Further Influence

 Hello Class,

I’ve been appreciating the influence from previous works seen in Murakami’s writing, and I wanted to use this blog post to analyze another potential layer. We’ve discussed the influence of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness on the story of Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase. The stories both utilize the same motifs of obsessive pursuit of a mission with symbolic ambiguity and the main characters grappling with the instability of meaning. I believe these themes can be traced further back to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Moby Dick is even mentioned explicitly in Chapter 26 of A Wild Sheep Chase during the discussion with the desk clerk at the Dolphin Hotel. I also believe this influence led to the inclusion of Boku’s allusionary obsession with the whale genitalia in the aquarium. The elusive white whale can be seen as a precursor to the characters of Kurtz and the Sheep stripped of their respective political/societal themes. Conrad frames Kurtz within the context of imperialism and Murakami frames the sheep through postmodern alienation and absurdity. In Chapter 42 of Moby Dick, the narrator describes the whale, “the vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form.” This mirrors the indescribable nature of both Kurtz and the sheep, with Kurtz’ dying words echoing, “The horror!” with no further explanation and the sheep dissolving into abstraction. 

Bradley Rosen