A Wild Sheep Chase

When I read Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase novel I definitively wasn’t expecting it. Anything. I wasn’t expecting any of it. And not in the sense of there being a lot of plot twists. I mean more of its general structure and tone. It got to the point where if something generally weird or out of place happened, I would just accept it fully, without questioning the logic of it. It’s almost like the book has a world with its own set of rules that don’t need to be questioned. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. In terms of my initial reaction to the book, it was hard for me to grab on to the structure of the story. I was halfway through the book before I realized that the Inciting Incident hadn’t even happened yet! It had a passive protagonist who just got dragged into whatever was happening, he had no ambitions, no real goals. Everything about it was breaking the basic storytelling rules that we’ve been learning about, and are commonplace in the west in order to have a “good” story. And yet… I had a lot of fun reading it. Even considering the parts of it that were “bland” I never felt bored. I found myself enjoying the book and getting swept away into the world. 

Comparing the story in the horror genre against what we generally expect from a traditionally western horror story, it’s definitively different. Japanese horror doesn’t seem to concern itself with logic. Not everything has an explanation. Some things simply are. In American horror, you find the pieces that let you defeat the monster. In the Japanese tradition, you just desperately try to endure it because the forces at play are far stronger and greater than you are. And they're not necessarily "good" or "evil." They just exist. This could be because spirits are more deeply rooted in Japanese folklore and are a tangible part of everyday life. There’s also a stronger element of internal conflict to heighten the horror that isn’t just a simple instinctual conflict of “try not to get eaten by the scary monster.” I think this adds a level of depth and is very interesting to say the least, even if it doesn’t always follow some sort of structure. The kind of horror that this book portrays is more unsettling and surreal than the kind of stories we are used to, and I think it is very successful in that sense.