I spent most of A Wild Sheep Chase fruitlessly chasing the sheep — not just literally, along with Boku, but also symbolically. I wanted to know what it meant. I kept waiting for a grand revelation at the end, but instead, I was left slightly unsatisfied. Was I supposed to crack it? Or was the sheep never meant to symbolize anything in the first place?
Literary scholar Yoshio Iwamoto notes that “Murakami himself has admitted the sheep” “was used primarily in the spirit of a game, without any deep significance” (Iwamoto, p. 300). Readers and critics have tried to assign symbolic meaning to it — perhaps it represents lost youth, modernization, or power — but, as Iwamoto suggests, “the clues lead nowhere,” and the narrative ends in “decentering and dispersal” (p. 300). I would argue that this lack of closure isn’t an accident, but rather, a feature of this novel as a work of postmodern literature.
As Mary Klages explains, postmodernism “doesn’t lament the idea of fragmentation, provisionality, or incoherence, but rather celebrates that” (Klages, p. 2). She writes that postmodern thought denies the old belief that “language must be transparent; it must function only to represent the real/perceivable world,” and instead asserts that “there are only signifiers, with no signifieds” (p. 4). In other words, the sheep does not point to a hidden truth. Instead, it points to our desire for meaning and subsequent postmodernist rejection of that promise.
That might sound frustrating (and it is) — but maybe, that frustration is the point. We’ve been trained by traditional narratives to expect that mysteries should have solutions and that symbols should “mean” something. Murakami subverts that expectation. Even though the novel is set up as a detective-style chase, it offers no real clues and no satisfying conclusion. I kept wondering whether I missed something. In the end, it seems that wondering is the whole experience.
Irina
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