Haruki Murakami - A Wild Sheep Chase

“How about the Sheep Professor? Wouldn’t he be thinking to come back home here?”

“The Sheep Professor is living in his memories. He’s got nowhere to go home to.”

“Maybe not.”

“Have some more beer,” said the Rat.

“Fine for now,” I said. With the heater off, I was nearly frozen through. The Rat opened another can and drank by himself.

“My father took a liking to this property, carried out some road improvements on his own, fixed up the house. He put a lot of money into it, I believe. Thanks to which, if you had a car, you could lead a fairly good life here, at least during the summer. Heat, flush toilet, shower, telephone, emergency electrical generator. How on earth the Sheep Professor lived here before that, I don’t know.”

The Rat made a noise that was neither belch nor sigh.

“Until I was fifteen, we came here every summer. My folks, my sister and me, and the maid who did the chores. When I think of it, those were probably the best years of my life. We leased the pasture to the town—still do, in fact—so when summer rolled around, the place was full of the town’s sheep. Sheep up to your ears. That’s why my memories of summer are always tied up with sheep.

“After that, the family almost never came up here. We got another vacation house closer to home for one thing, and my sister got married for another. I wasn’t counting myself in the family much anymore, my father’s company was going through hard times, and well, all sorts of things were going on. Whatever, the property was abandoned. The last time I came up here was eleven years ago. And that time I came alone. By myself for a month.”

The Rat lingered for a second, as if he were remembering.

“Were you lonely?” I asked.

“Me, lonely? You got to be kidding. If it was possible, I would have stayed on up here. But no way that could have happened. It’s my father’s house, after all. You wouldn’t have caught me doing my old man the service.”

“But what about now?”

“The same goes,” said the Rat. “I got to say that this was the last place I wanted to come back to. Yet when I came across the photograph of this place in the Dolphin Hotel, I wanted to see it one more time. For sentimental reasons. Even you get that way at times, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said. There was my shoreline that got filled in.

“That’s when I heard the Sheep Professor’s story. About the dream sheep with a star on its back. You know about that, I take it?”

“Indeed I do.”

“So to put it simply,” said the Rat, “I heard that story and hurried up here wanting to spend the whole winter. I couldn’t shake the urge. Father or not, it didn’t matter to me anymore. I pulled together my kit and came up. Like I was being drawn up here.”

“That’s when you ran into the sheep?”

“That’s right,” said the Rat.

“What happened after that is difficult to talk about,” said the Rat.

The Rat took his second empty can and squeezed a dent into it.

“Maybe you could ask me questions? You already know pretty much what there is to know, right?”

“Okay, but if it makes no difference to you, let’s not start at the beginning.”

“Fire away.”

“You’re already dead, aren’t you?”

I don’t know how long it took the Rat to reply. Could have been a few seconds, could have been … It was a long silence. My mouth was all dry inside.

“That’s right,” said the Rat finally. “I’m dead.”

“I hanged myself from a beam in the kitchen,” said the Rat. “The Sheep Man buried me next to the garage. Dying itself wasn’t all that painful, if you worry about that sort of thing. But really, that hardly matters.”

“When?”

“A week before you got here.”

“You wound the clock then, didn’t you?”

The Rat laughed. “Damn, if that’s not a mystery. I mean the very, very last thing I did in my thirty-year life was to wind a clock. Now why should anyone who’s about to die wind a clock? Makes no sense.”

The Rat stopped speaking, and everything was still, except for the ticking of the clock. The snow absorbed all other sound. We were like two castaways in outer space.

“What if …”

“Stop it,” the Rat cut me short. “There are no more ifs. You know that, right?”

I shook my head. No, I didn’t.

“If you had come here a week earlier, I still would have died. Maybe we could’ve met under warmer, brighter circumstances. But it’s all the same. I would have had to die. Otherwise things would have only gotten harder. And I guess I didn’t want to bear that kind of hardship.”

“So why did you have to die?”

There was the sound of his rubbing the palms of his hands together.

“I don’t want to talk too much about that. It would only turn into a self-acquittal. And there’s nothing more inappropriate than a dead man coming to his own defense, don’t you think?”

“But if you don’t tell me, I’ll never know.”

“Have some more beer.”

“I’m cold,” I said.

“It’s not that cold.”

With trembling hands, I opened another beer and drank a sip. And with the drink in me, it really didn’t seem as cold.

“Okay, if you promise not to tell this to anyone.”

“Even if I did tell someone, who’d believe me?”

“You got me there,” said the Rat with a chuckle. “I doubt anyone would believe it. It’s so crazy.”

The clock struck nine-thirty.

“Mind if I stop the clock?” asked the Rat. “It makes such a racket.”

“Help yourself. It’s your clock.”

The Rat stood up, opened the door to the grandfather clock, and grabbed the pendulum. All sound, all time, vanished.

“What happened was this,” said the Rat. “I died with the sheep in me. I waited until the sheep was fast asleep, then I tied a rope over the beam in the kitchen and hanged myself. There wasn’t enough time for the sucker to escape.”

“Did you have to go that far?”

“Yes, I had to go that far. If I waited, the sheep would have controlled me absolutely. It was my last chance.”

The Rat rubbed his palms together again. “I wanted to meet you when I was myself, with everything squared away. My own self with my own memories and my own weaknesses. That’s why I sent you that photograph as a kind of code. If by some accident it steered you this way, I thought I would be saved in the end.”

“And have you been saved?”

“Yeah, I’ve been saved all right,” said the Rat, quietly.

“The key point here is weakness,” said the Rat. “Everything begins from there. Can you understand what I’m getting at?”

“People are weak.”

“As a general rule,” said the Rat, snapping his fingers a couple of times. “But line up all the generalities you like and you still won’t get anywhere. What I’m talking about now is a very individual thing. Weakness is something that rots in the body. Like gangrene. I’ve felt that ever since I was a teenager. That’s why I was always on edge. There’s this something inside you that’s rotting away and you feel it all along. Can you understand what that’s like?”

I sat silent, wrapped up in the blanket.

“Probably not,” the Rat continued. “There isn’t that side to you. But, well, anyway, that’s weakness. It’s the same as a hereditary disease, weakness. No matter how much you understand it, there’s nothing you can do to cure yourself. It’s not going to go away with a clap of the hand. It just keeps getting worse and worse.”