Melissa Brooks

A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami Pgs. 231-293

The strange man tells Boku, “When Karl Marx posited the proletariat, he thereby cemented their mediocrity” (113). I think Murakami is critical of menial labor, and perhaps any work that constrains people to rigid schedules that are out of sync with a person’s “natural” rhythms. What I mean by this is that many jobs are on a fixed schedule and consequently, every other activity in people’s lives work around this fixed schedule, even sleeping—rather than waking up because we are well-rested, we wake up to alarm clocks so we can be at work on time. It also could just be any job that begins to usurp a person’s own will (for instance, the strange man says his life has no purpose without the boss). As far as I can see at the moment, this criticism seems to pertain to pretty much all work other than that of the artist (writer, painter, sculptor, dancer, etc.), who has the freedom to work based on his or her own personal schedule. All other jobs seem to “dampen the spirit,” in a sense; this explains Boku’s unwavering daily routine, passivity and apathy before he embarked on the wild sheep chase.

The allegiance we submit to jobs we don’t really care about prevents us from “really living.” The manager of the dolphin hotel says, “I sometimes wish I could go off in search of something…I always thought that’s what life is like. An ongoing search” (194). Although he wants to go search for something, he never does. He stays tied to the hotel. Boku’s girlfriend also suggests that the marrow of life is in searching: “This is just the sort of thing I love. Let me tell you, it’s more fun than sleeping witch strangers or flashing my ears or proofreading biographical dictionaries. This is living” (171). Here, the girlfriend refers to each of her three jobs, with which she’s dissatisfied. On this sheep chase, however, she is really living. Murakami may be suggesting that each of us has to search for something…what that something is, I’m not sure. It could be meaning, truth, ourselves, maybe all of these, or something else. But whatever it is, we have to keep searching, because this search gives us spirit; if we get wrapped up in the mediocrity of jobs we don’t really care about, we lose this spirit.