Haruki Murakami's A WILD SHEEP CHASE (Tr Alfred Birnbaum, Narr Rupert Degas), with an excursis on giving audio books a second chance and a convoluted/ confessional farewell to Twitter

Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase was originally penned and published some 17 years, and translated about ten years before Neal Stephenson first dropped a big ol' heap of Solomonian-cum-Nazi gold on us, so it's not unreasonable that I feel like, in the latter's character of Goto Dengo, Stephenson could have been making up the back story of the mysterious "Right Wing Figure" who starts the sheep chase a-running? Right? Anyway, that's my head-canon and I'm sticking with it. Yeehaw and pass the Cap'n Crunch.

Of course this mysterious figure also reminds me more than a little bit of Babylen, the protagonist of my favorite Russian novel that only Victor Ginsburg loves as much as I do, Victor Pelevin's hilarious and terrifying Homo Zapiens. Since he, too, winds up being the true king of all media and maybe the secret ruler of the world, or at least his country. 

There are prefigurings, too, of William Gibson's terrifyingly banal Hubertus Bigend -- and the quest upon which this figure sends our narrator is distinctly Bigendian, though it feels more like a sentimental than a commercial McGuffin. Bigend sought the footage because so many other people were, making it a marketing phenomenon we're pretty sure he wanted to exploit; this figure, whom we only come to know as The Boss, is dying and has this last weird little obsession he wants to satisfy before he goes. And it happens to be a sheep.

But so, what about the sheep?

Well, we'll get to that. Something else is on my chest a bit. See, this wasn't my first time trying to engage with this bit of early Murakami; last time I just couldn't connect with it, wrote it off as a regretted purchase. I may even have tweeted that I thought I might be "over" Murakami.*

But what I was really over was the audio book I'd bought. The narrator, Rupert Degas is a fine one and I've enjoyed him on other projects for which his snide, almost hostile-sounding, hard-boiled narrating style that at times almost amounts to a Jack Nicholson impersonation, is right. But it is discordant and weird for a writer so prone to lyricism, playfulness and scenery porn as Murakami. And not in that fun Ez/Ra Embassytown way, either. More like turning over the Phish catalog to a death metal band. 

Also, some character voices, not only all of the women (though the women are... ugh, I don't even feel like getting into it) but also two of the men, are annoying as hell.  Yeah, yeah, one of them is literally known as The Rat, but I was utterly repelled by the excessive rattiness of The Rat's voice and speech patterns. Plus, several characters were given distinctly regional U.S. accents, both choices made to emphasize a stereotyped belief about people who have those accents in the United States. Ugh.

But it's January in Japan, and I'm not above falling into a good ol' sunk cost fallacy once in a while.

Sometimes it even pays off.

This time, it paid off. I'm so glad I gave it another chance, even though my dislike of the narration still detracted from my enjoyment -- although it occurs to me that since this phenomenon made me take the story in smaller doses, as it were, I might have savored the good stuff more?

And there is so much good stuff. A Wild Sheep Chase is early Murakami, but it already has everything we go to his work expecting. It starts off firmly grounded in reality, as our freshly-divorced protagonist, who runs a middling-successful advertising firm with an old friend, first gets a new girlfriend who has the most beautiful ears in all the world; she looks like an ordinary, even slightly plain, woman if she lets her hair cover those ears, but when she lets them show it's like she's casting a spell.

Meanwhile, his off-handed decision to use a photograph sent to him by his old friend The Rat (who features in several early Murakami novels but about whom I feel still I know nothing; the first two books in which he appears haven't been anywhere near as accessible to me as this one and its sequel, until very recently) in a newsletter his firm publishes, with strange consequences. Suddenly a mysterious, hyper-competent and very precise man who claims to represent a powerful figure in Japan's right wing shows up demanding not only to know where that photo came from but that the newsletter be withdrawn completely from circulation and obliterated from memory, no matter the cost to the protagonist and his firm. At first our boy finds this ridiculous, but his partner, much more connected and business savvy, knows who The Boss is and doesn't want to cross him: do whatever he wants, man, this is serious!

But it's not enough that the newsletter disappear; something that appeared in the photograph needs to appear, and fast. The Boss has weird, possibly supernatural, ideas about this thing and his representative believes that if The Boss dies without finding it, all that The Boss has built, which is apparently most of the socioeconomic structure of modern Japan, could very well collapse. And so our protagonist is sent off with his beautiful-eared girlfriend to find, among all of Hokkaido's 9000-some sheep, one with a black star-shaped birthmark.

The fact that they do isn't a spoiler but I won't disclose how they do it, except to say that it brings them into the orbit of some even quirkier characters and a lot of agricultural history, which the latter had no business being as interesting as it was, which again proves that it's not Haruki Murakami that I'm over. I'm even ready to spend a credit on Dance, Dance, Dance someday, maybe.

*First of all, yes, I know, whaaaaaaaaaaaat? And second, no, I can't look for or link to the tweet. I use, or, I guess that should be used now, a very old third party Twitter client, on which that alabaster lunched, Lonny Emeralds, pulled the plug this week along with all the other third party apps. And this is a bigger problem for me than it would seem at most; it's not just my keen disgust at being forced into his gross, add-riddled, algorithm-deranged version of the service, but also a uniquely dumb conundrum I made for myself over a decade ago, when I created a second Twitter account solely to talk to someone I dearly loved but who felt overwhelmed by my daily firehose of tweets back then. For which I had to create a dummy email address. But then for some reason that seemed good at the time, I switched the email addresses I used for each Twitter account and then, over the years, during which the friend for whom I created what I called my whispering account died giving me no more reason to use it, never got around to switching them back... and forgot the password for the dummy email address. To which my main Twitter account was still linked and has been for years. And I've been happily using my legacy Twitter account from phone to phone to phone, rarely having had to re-enter my password when I got a new phone, and found when I tried to sign into the native Android Twitter app to at least get into Lonny Emeralds' Shitter Twitter, what I'd confidently thought over the years was my Twitter password since I'd last bought a new phone, was wrong. And since I've long forgotten the password to the dummy email the account is linked to, well, there you go. I've made my last post on Twitter. And no, I don't want advice or suggestions, I'm fine with making a clean break. I'm happily tooting over at Mastodon. Join me,  won't you?