A Wild Sheep Chase

The narrator wakes up in the middle of the night to find his girlfriend gone. He knows immediately that she is gone, because of a new stillness in the air: “The vacated atmosphere of the house was final, undeniable. It was a feeling I had known well in the couple of months between the time my wife left me and the time I met my girlfriend” (286).

The narrator is both resigned to, and devastated by, his girlfriend’s disappearance: “I could not accept the fact of her disappearance […] There was almost nothing one could do except let things take their course” (287). He heats up the stew that she has left for him, opens a bottle of red wine, listens to music, and plays a game of solitaire. He reflects that at this time of year, autumn, the city is a pleasant place to be, and imagines himself back in Tokyo and sitting in a bar: “The more I thought about it, the more that other me became the real me, making this me here not real at all” (288).

Going to bed, he first imagines his girlfriend making her way down the mountain, then the Rat taking his photograph of the sheep. Then both of these images dissolve for him, and he begins to read Sherlock Holmes. 

The narrator wakes up and makes himself a big breakfast, finding an odd solace in his loneliness: “Loneliness wasn’t such a bad feeling. It was like the stillness of the pine oak after the little birds had flown off” (290). After breakfast he smokes a cigarette, realizing that he will run out of cigarettes soon, and reflects that the tidiness of the house is probably a function of boredom and solitude: “Unless you kept moving up here, you’d lose all sense of time” (291).

He goes outside for a walk; it is a beautiful, clear day. In front of the garage, behind the house, he discovers another cigarette butt; he realizes that he has seen no ashtrays in the house, and that the Rat probably doesn’t smoke. He opens the garage door to find that there is a Toyota Land Cruiser inside, and wonders why it is that the Rat has left the mountain without taking his car.

He then leaves the garage to sit down on an old tire in the middle of the meadow. Sitting in this spot reminds him of a feeling that he used to have while participating in ocean swim races; stopping halfway through the race, and in between two islands, he would have an eerie sense of life going on without him.

He then goes home to read Sherlock Holmes, but is soon interrupted by the Sheep Man.

The Sheep Man (this is not the Sheep Professor, to clarify) is a short, squat man in a sheep costume: an obvious fake. (He is represented in a drawing–the only drawing in the book–on Page 296). His manner is at once abrupt and evasive. He comes into the house without introducing himself or asking permission, and speaks in a rough slur, so that all of his words are represented on the page as a single long word. He immediately demands a drink, and accuses the narrator of driving his girlfriend away: “Youconfusedher” (298). At the same time, he is unforthcoming about the whereabouts of the Rat, and about his own role in the narrator’s girlfriend’s disappearance.

The narrator senses that the Sheep Man is lying, or is at least not being completely truthful, and decides to deal with him by no longer asking him any questions: “The Sheep Man was just like an animal. Approach him and he’d retreat, move away and he’d come closer” (300). He catches glimpses of the Rat in the Sheep Man’s gesture of looking at the front and the back of his own hand. Their encounter ends with the Sheep Man saying that he will return, this time asking the narrator’s permission first.

Alone, the narrator makes himself dinner, and imagines the house as a restaurant, in which many of his friends and acquaintances, both old and recent, might have a role: “The Rat could run it, I could cook. The Sheep Man could be good for something too […] Now if we could get J to come up here, I’m sure things would work out fine” (303). 

The narrator spends three days alone in the house, taking walks and making himself elaborate meals. He imagines that he sees figures in the meadow, such as the Rat, his girlfriend, and even the sheep. A week after his arrival in the house, it snows, a heavy snow to which the narrator is unaccustomed, as a city dweller: “This was no pitiful snow as sometimes falls in Tokyo. This was the real thing, an honest-to-goodness north-country snow” (305).

After the snowfall, the narrator feels a sense of absolute aloneness, but also a peaceful attunement to the rhythms of nature. He is aware of the sun melting the snow in the pasture and the birds chirping “as if set free” (306). After dinner that evening, he comes upon an old newspaper clipping that the Rat has been using as a bookmark; turning over the paper, he sees the advertisement that he and his girlfriend had composed for him back in the Dolphin Hotel. He realizes that the Rat has for some reason not wanted to face him, even while he is allowing him to stay in his house. He also realizes that the Sheep Man must have a role in all of this.

The following day he heads into the woods, in an attempt to find the Sheep Man. He finds him not in the woods but sitting by the side of the road, on the opposite bank. He questions the Sheep Man, once again, about Rat’s whereabouts, and the Sheep Man is once again evasive. He also asks the Sheep Man how he survives up here in the winter, and how he ended up in the mountains in the first place. To this, the Sheep Man replies, “Ididn’twanttogotowar” (312).

That evening, the narrator prepares another copious meal for himself, and picks up a book called The Heritage of Pan Asianism. He finds this book–as he found the history of the Junitaki township–sketchy and dull, with strange omissions in it: “On some pages, words had been crossed out. There was not a single line on the February 26th Incident” (314). However, he then notices the Boss’s name among a list of names of Pan-Asianists, and sees that his permanent residence is given as Hokkaido–Junitaki-cho. He realizes that the Boss’s secretary must have known all along where the meadow was. The narrator has the sense of being in the middle of a trap he does not understand. 

The narrator–not for the first time—takes an existential approach to his predicament, and decides to go on making himself meals and cleaning up the house as if everything were normal. In the midst of cleaning up a strangely grubby mirror, the narrator catches sight of his own reflection and has a frightening moment of disembodiment and alienation: “It wasn’t myself I was seeing: on the contrary, it was as if I were the reflection of the mirror and this flat-me-of-an-image were seeing the real me” (319).

A few days later, the Sheep Man again comes to see him. The narrator receives him gently at first, offering him a beer and picking up a guitar of the Rat’s to play. Eventually, though, he declares to the Sheep Man that he is angry, and smashes the guitar; the Sheep Man is apologetic, but insists that he cannot give the narrator what he wants. Going into the kitchen for another beer, the narrator looks in to the mirror again, and realizes that he cannot see the Sheep Man’s reflection there; he further realizes that the Sheep Man is a kind of spirit, or ghost.

Returning to the Sheep Man, he tells him–this time calmly–that he will see the Rat tonight, as he will be leaving the mountain the following morning. The Sheep Man takes his leave, and the narrator goes to sleep and has a nightmare: “A dream too terrifying to recall” (323). 

Following the nightmare, the narrator lies awake in the dark. He has something of the same frightening sense of detachment that he earlier had while staring at his reflection in the mirror. He is slow to recognize his life–and even his body—as his own: “The face my hand felt in the dark wasn’t my own, I didn’t think. It was the face of another that had taken the shape of my face” (325). 

He can sense little in the room beyond mysteriously-shifting darkness and the passing of time. As the clock strikes 9 p.m., the Rat appears. 

The Rat insists on total darkness while he and the narrator talk. He tells the narrator about the history of the house and how he ended up here. He tells him that he was drawn to come back to the house–despite the house’s inconvenient location— because of happy memories that he had of vacationing up here as a child, memories which were “tied up with sheep” (329). He found out about the house being empty from the Sheep Professor at the Dolphin Hotel, and then ran into “the sheep” himself: “What happened next is difficult to talk about” (330).

The Rat then requests that the narrator ask him questions, to which he will reply. The first question that the narrator asks him–a question to which he already knows the answer–is if the Rat is already dead. The Rat confirms that he is.  

The Rat tells the narrator that he hung himself, in order to kill both himself and the magical sheep, which had chosen him as a vessel to inhabit after the Boss. He describes the sheep as a force of “total anarchy” and “a dynamo manifesting the vital force at the root of all life in one solitary point of the universe” (335). He tells the narrator that he sent him the photograph as a coded way to steer him to this house, and that he was not expecting his girlfriend to come along, which was why he sent her away. He tells the narrator that his girlfriend is “perfectly well,” but is now ordinary, stripped of her psychic powers (338).

He tells the narrator that he is meeting a man at noon the following day. He asks the narrator himself to leave the house at 930 a.m. the next morning, and to rewind the clock–which the Rat had requested be turned off while they talked–before he goes.  

Following the Rat’s visit, the narrator goes to bed and experiences something akin to fever and delirium. At different times, different voices seem to be in the room with him: those of the Sheep Man, his ex-wife, his girlfriend, the Boss’s secretary, and even the Boss’s chauffeur. Many of these voices speak, in one way or another, of time and flux. His ex-wife’s voice reminds him that “[t]he cells replace themselves,” while the chauffer’s voice tells him that his cat’s name has now changed and that “[n]ames change all the time. I bet you can’t even remember your own name” (340-41). The Rat’s voice meanwhile instructs him again to wind the clock before he leaves.  

The narrator wakes up still shaken, but with his fever gone. He rewinds the clock and bids goodbye to his mirror image. He leaves the house the same way that he came, although this time through snow. He pauses on the treacherous bend where he and his girlfriend, on their way up the mountain, were dropped off by the shepherd; though the snow has not frozen, he is frightened that the ground might still crumble beneath him. He looks out over the snow-covered valley, and finds it “marvelous, actually” (344). Making his way down to the following bend, he sees the Boss’s secretary waiting for him, standing in front of a new Jeep. 

The secretary tells the narrator that the Boss has died and that there has been a grand funeral for him. He also confirms that he knew all along about the meadow’s location, while congratulating the narrator on his tenacity and astuteness: “I almost wish you would consider working for me” (346). He tells the narrator that his role was to draw the Rat out of his “mental lair,” so that the sheep would become available, and also discloses that the narrator’s partner, back in Tokyo, has shut down the agency (346). In parting, he hands the narrator a check–which the narrator does not bother to examine–and tells the narrator that he will see him again.

The Boss’s chauffeur is waiting for the narrator in the Jeep, to drive him down the remainder of the mountain to the train station. The narrator does not listen to his chatter, although he listens enough to understand that it concerns the Boss’s funeral and the chauffeur’s experiences sitting Kipper. At the end of the drive, the chauffeur asks the narrator if he has tried telephoning God yet. The narrator replies that he has not, and the chauffeur confesses that he has lately been unable to reach him.

On the train, the narrator feels a relief at being in “the land of the living” again: “No matter how boring or mediocre it might be, this was my world” (348). Through the window, he hears a distant booming sound; looking out the window, he sees a stream of black smoke rising from the mountaintop. 

At the Dolphin Hotel, the narrator visits the Sheep Professor and tells him that both of their quests are over. The Sheep Professor is despondent to hear this, as he now no longer has a purpose in life, futile though his purpose had been: “I had robbed him of his obsession […] and whether I was right to have done it, I was never more unsure” (349).

The proprietor at the hotel tells him that his girlfriend went “somewhere,” and that she didn’t look well; the narrator tells him, “Never mind” (349). Watching television in his room that night, he is surprised to hear nothing about any explosions on any mountains. He has difficulty sleeping once again, this time because he is unused to his new, relatively urban surroundings. He ends up going to a discotheque and getting drunk: “This helped give me a sense of the normal […] Everybody was counting on me to be normal” (350).

Returning, he asks the proprietor to wake him at 8 a.m. the following morning, and wishes him well in his relationship with his father: “Give it time” (351). The following day, he flies to Tokyo-Haneda, his hometown, and visits his and the Rat’s old acquaintance, J, at his bar. He tells J that he saw the Rat, but tells him nothing beyond that. He gives J the check that the secretary had given him, telling J that he can use it to pay off his debts for the bar and that he and the Rat will be silent partners.

He then takes his leave of J and goes to take a walk to the mouth of the river, to sit on what is left of the beach. He sits and weeps for a moment, then gets up to leave; like the Rat’s abandoned girlfriend in Chapter 16 of the novel, he is aware of “the sound of the waves” (353).