Week Three: A Wild Sheep Chase

When we talk about "horror" in Western culture we often think of zombies, ghosts, frightening situations with supernatural beings and things out of our control that will lead to our demise. While to us horror is becoming more and more about jump-scares and ugly ghosts that haunts us at night, in Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase the "horror" lies in the monotonous and dull life of our main character, his inner battles, and his journey to truly find himself and the end of his mediocrity. 

One of the various interesting aspects of this novel to me is how the author makes sure to emphasize this idea of mediocrity and isolation that the character suffers from, so much so that throughout the entire story we don't learn a single name of a single character, rather we are given titles such as "girlfriend" "The Boss" "Rat" "The Sheep".

 In a way by doing so, a certain feeling of uneasiness was settled within me as I read it, as if a piece was missing and I wasn't quite being tied down to anything. It felt as if I was the main character at times, not really tied down to anything, isolating myself and just living a life without true enjoyment, but rather as another task that should be achieved. 

As I became more and more aware of that, one thing that came to my understanding is how the vision towards certain events can be interpreted differently depending on the culture. In Western, we find horrifying situations that involve a lot of violence, blood, chase scenes and hauntings in dark places, that nowadays we often overlook a much simpler, and yet sometimes even scarier than any monster — ourselves, and our minds. This idea of battling against your inner demons, your fears that are not shaped as ugly creatures but rather as long lasting journeys that test your own values is what I feel was the most explored in this work of Murakami's, and in Japanese works in general. 

Not only in horror, but in various genres, we see a very clear difference between Western and Eastern view of life itself. While in Western culture we often focus on the outside and the broader aspects, in Eastern, and in specifically Japanese, their focus are on things that we deem as small and ordinary, but that are essential in all of our lives and in truth hold a much bigger meaning that can be explored, something that Murakami in A Wild Sheep Chase is not afraid to dive in and explore. 

This idea of exploring things so ordinary may seem like a dull move at first, but it is actually incredibly smart and captivating. In A Wild Sheep Chase, for example, we as readers at first are taken aback by the uneventful, boring and mundane routine of our protagonist. We are reading what pretty much feels like (and is) his life story,  and growing impatient with the thought of the upcoming terrors he will meet — maybe an awful ghost that will chase him down? Or will he end up on a house on a hill with a crazy psychopath? — only to in the end find out that there were no monsters, and although he did meet ghosts on his way to his mission of finding the so called "Magical Sheep", his true obstacle was no one other than himself, his life, his values motivations (or rather, lack of those), his inner demons and his journey to find once again the emotions he thought he never had.