A Wild Sheep Chase

by Haruki Murakami

“The sun climbs high in the sky, then starts down. People come, then go. The time breezes by. That’s like a picnic, isn’t it?”

She laughed. She put her cigarette out, drank down the rest of her tea, then lit up again. “I’m going to live to be twenty-five,” she said, “then die.”

It occurred to me after I ground the coffee that what I really wanted was ice tea. I’m forever realizing things too late.

deep

Staring at that chair where no one sat, I felt like a tiny child in a De Chirico painting, left behind all alone in a foreign country.

deeep

What was worse, the severed penis exuded a singular, somehow unspeakable aura of sadness. It came back to me, that giant whale’s penis, after having intercourse with a girl for the very first time. What twists of fate, what torturous circumnavigations, had brought it to that cavernous exhibition room. My heart ached, thinking about it.

“Does it bother you to have your ears discussed?” “Not really. It depends on the angle of discussion.” She shook her head as she lifted her fork to her mouth. “Tell me straight, because that’s my favorite angle.”

“I turn a corner,” I offered, “just as someone ahead of me turns the next corner. I can’t see what that person looks like. All I can make out is a flash of white coattails. But the whiteness of the coat-tails is indelibly etched in my consciousness. Ever get that feeling?”

I drink beer in summer, whiskey in winter.” “And two days out of three you eat omelettes and sandwiches in bars, right?” “Uh-huh,” I said. “What an interesting life.”

“Is that why you and your wife split up?” “Like I said before, there’s no one thing I can put it all down to. But as Nietzsche said, ‘The gods furl their flags at boredom.’ Or something like that.”

She’d become so beautiful, it defied understanding. Never had I feasted my eyes on such beauty. Beauty of a variety I’d never imagined existed. As expansive as the entire universe, yet as dense as a glacier. Unabashedly excessive, yet at the same time pared down to an essence. It transcended all concepts within the boundaries of my awareness. She was at one with her ears, gliding down the oblique face of time like a protean beam of light.

“That’s because you’re only half-living,” she said briskly. “The other half is still untapped somewhere.”

Time really is one big continuous cloth, no? We habitually cut out pieces of time to fit us, so we tend to fool ourselves into thinking that time is our size, but it really goes on and on.

Life and the universe does not revolve around you. You are a part of a whole, and you must create meaning from within remembering the apathy and insignificance of yourself relative to the outside

“The song is over. But the melody lingers on.”

The road by the river had been one of my favorites. I could walk at the same speed as the river. I could feel it breathing. It was alive. More than anything, it was the river we had to thank for creating the town. For grinding down the hills over how many hundreds of thousands of years, for hauling the dirt, filling the sea, and making the trees grow. The town belonged to the river from the very beginning, and it would always be that way.

The world goes on without me. People cross streets through no intervention on my part, sharpen pencils, move fifty yards a minute west to east, fill coffee lounges with music that’s refined into nothingness.

I lit up a second cigarette and ordered another whiskey. The second whiskey is always my favorite. From the third on, it no longer has any taste. It’s just something to pour into your stomach.

You hold the ball, you had better run for the goal. Even if there turns out not to have been any goal.”

“Certainly. I get irritated, I get upset. Especially when I’m in a hurry. But I see it all as part of our training. To get irritated is to lose our way in life.” “That sounds like a religious interpretation of a traffic jam if there ever was one.”

There were hundreds of varieties of orchids, each with a history of its own. Royalty had been known to die for the sake of orchids. Orchids had an ineffable aura of fatalism.

Humans by necessity must have a midway point between their desires and their pride. Just as all objects must have a center of gravity.

“When it gets this clear, God’s messages must have no trouble getting through at all,” I offered. “Nothing of the kind,” said the chauffeur with a grin. “There are messages already in all things. In the flowers, in the rocks, in the clouds …”

“Cute cat, eh?” said the chauffeur, also relieved. The cat was anything but cute. Rather, he weighed in at the opposite end of the scale, his fur was scruffy like an old, threadbare carpet, the tip of his tail was bent at a sixty-degree angle, his teeth were yellowed, his right eye oozed pus from a wound three years before so that by now he could hardly see. It was doubtful that he could distinguish between a tennis shoe and a potato. The pads of his feet were shriveled-up corns, his ears were infested with ear lice, and from sheer age he farted at least twenty times a day.

“Body cells replace themselves every month. Even at this very moment,” she said, thrusting a skinny back of her hand before my eyes. “Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.

“We’ve come to ask a few things about sheep, if we might.” “Eat shit!” yelled the Sheep Professor from inside. A mighty healthy voice for seventy-three.

The smell of rain was suddenly everywhere.

On distance swims between two islands, I would sometimes stop mid-course to look around. To find myself equidistant between two points gave me the funniest feeling. To think that back on dry land people were going about business as usual was pretty peculiar too. Unsettling, that society could go on perfectly well without me.

There was no one, of course. Only silence which rolled like oil into every corner. Only silence which changed ever so slightly from room to room. I was all alone. Probably more alone than I’d been in all my life.

wanted to scream, I wanted to cry, but for what? Long, long before this moment, there had to have been something worth crying about.

I went into the kitchen for another beer. Each time I walked past the stairs, there was the mirror. The other me had apparently gone for another beer too. We looked each other in the face and sighed. Living in two separate worlds, we still thought about the same things.

A moment’s pause came between us. “Goodbye,” said the Rat. “See you,” said I.

“Thanks,” I told the chauffeur. “Don’t mention it,” he said. “By the way, have you tried God’s telephone number?” “No, I haven’t had time.”

I walked along the river to its mouth. I sat down on the last fifty yards of beach, and I cried. I never cried so much in my life. I brushed the sand from my trousers and got up, as if I had somewhere to go. The day had all but ended. I could hear the sound of waves as I started to walk.