Brand Names and Hyper-specific Objects Are Symbols of Reality

    in The Wild Sheep Chase. I must have been too stupid to understand it or something, yet the book was a wrestle between reality and the surreal in some sorts. The narrator could never remember anything yet he was able to remember the name of every murderer in Ellery Queen novels. He reads Sherlock Holmes, watches Hitchcock films, and the novel is clearly influenced by Chandler. As a novel that can hardly be labeled detective fiction, Murakami is certainly paying homage to the genre--a genre of detectives who rely on rationality and specificity to solve crime, a genre where one logical cause leads to a logical conclusion, where Ellery Queen can put some order into a chaotic and messy world. There must have been some significance with the whale penis, the dead man's curve, the girlfriend's ear, and the grape juice that I'm not seeing. Who knows. 

The Rat had a passage about his weakness that I really liked:

I guess I felt attached to my weakness. My pain and suffering too. Summer light, the smell of a breeze, the sound of cicadas--if I like these things, why should I apologize. The same with having a beer with you...

What sadness. The weakness of youth that will never return. The friendships never to be found again, the loves that could never be traced back and the names never remembered. The novel is structurally strikingly similar to The Long Goodbye, which I thought was just such a masterpiece because of its refrain and cynicism. Murakami takes that which him and adds a line of the surreal, which I can't be sure worked in his favor. But maybe Marlowe could have used a little bit of The Rat's acceptance, admitting his emotions rather than sequestering them. If Terry Lennox was so important to him that he would withstand jail, why doesn't he just tell him? And he must say something like, "So long, amigo. I won't say goodbye. I said it to you when it meant something. I said it when it was sad and lonely and final."

--Bruce Zhou