Murakami Haruki's A Wild Sheep Chase: The horror of magical realism

Despite my brother always holding onto the book 1Q84 calling it a masterpiece, I haven’t actually read Haruki Murakami’s book throughout my whole life. And so, the lesson on J-Horror and the mention of Haruki Murakami’s book was quite a nice opportunity for me, which was to approach his work which really triggered my curiosity due to my brother’s endless admiration.

A Wild Sheep Chase by Murakami Haruki was quite a surreal book. And yet, the style of it fit the profile of other Korean literatures that I’ve studied and turned out to like during my past high school years. I found that some people were having the ‘what the hell is happening?!’ moment while they were reading this book, however for me it was the most soothing, calming way of narrative. The subtle similes and several sentences and paragraphs that are cut short: it all reminded me of my Korean literature instructor’s teaching that ‘every structure, ever word, even every character that we think are ‘weird’ holds a meaning.

A Wild Sheep Chase was like a written version of Rene Magritte. It was truly weird and so parted away from reality. I believe that this novel has a touch of magical realism, which I believe is the trace of western influence that we’ve discussed as a class which has been pulled in by Murakami to this particular literature piece. Just like how we’ve talked about A Wild Sheep Chase being the mixture of Japanese and Western literature, I believe that what Murakami is achieving through this new literary hybrid is to create a particular mood through the separation from reality.

Japanese horror typically creates a frightening mood through slow and subtle development of a certain scene or story. In A Wild Sheep Chase, Murakami creates this mood through magical realism. As we read this novel, all the scenes and chapters are based on a normal, boring life of a male who just went through divorce. The surreal aspect kicks in with the appearance of the lady with the ‘splendid ears’, who could pull out a strong power of attraction just by showing her ears. In fact, this is the point of the story when the ‘sheep chase’ begins, which altogether triggers a surreal situation to jump in to the boring everyday life of the protagonist. This is what I believe is the main aspect of horror: a subtle change that breaks the tie away from reality, because anything that is unreal means that it is hard to predict.

In fact, the protagonist’s loss of innocence is also crucial to the horror element of the story. From the very beginning of the story, something that the main protagonist is most closely associated to is having sex. Also, his working partner even tells him how he were more innocent in the old days. Murakami hints the readers that the disappearance of innocence is also something that is critical towards the main story. In addition, the protagonist’s weird attention to the whale’s penis also shows what priorities he has in life. In fact, all the sheep chase has been triggered since he has met the lady, whom he asked to come to bed with him as soon as he saw her ears.

All these different aspects altogether seems to show how the main character is slowly stepping away from his original self, which is the biggest frightening aspect since it also seems so imply that ‘there is no turning back’.