Skip to main content

Week 3: A Wild Sheep Chase (#6 points)

  



Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase has a lot of metaphors and symbols. Because of its implications, I even felt like I was reading a long poem, rather than a novel. The adventure of chasing a sheep is maybe about our life. The sheep can be seen as some kind of ‘desire’ in our life. The main character who didn’t know what the sheep was, was forced to pursue the sheep by a man in a black suit. He didn’t even think he wanted a sheep but ended up chasing the sheep. He didn’t want to live such a life, but society drove him to pursue desires such as wealth, glory, and power. If someone chases only material possessions, it can cause the loss of more valuable things in our life.

   Rat said what makes us feel the gap between reality and ideal is the weakness of us. If we dream of 100 percent, we can achieve only 60 to 70 percent in reality. Maybe less than 10 percent. However, we strongly believe that we can close those gaps. I think it is inevitable to be possessed by a sheep. The process of chasing a sheep is sweet and happy. The more we believe we can catch a sheep someday, the sweeter it is. But one day, when we feel that we can’t catch a sheep when the moment we get weak, we can easily be collapsed. 


   I feel sad when the main character ‘I’, ‘rat’, and many other characters were collapsed while chasing the sheep. While I was reading this story, I kept putting myself into the characters’ situations. Do I have a sheep? Does chasing a sheep matter in my life? 

The novel tells us that when we have sheep, we can have infinite energy and extraordinary abilities. Perhaps in that regard, I think maybe my sheep had escaped. 

It is foolish to judge the existence of a sheep by age, but I think my sheep are disappearing as I get older. Once I achieve short-term goals and then I feel a sense of loss and emptiness as if I am back to square one, rather than feel a sense of accomplishment and a new desire for the next sheep. I am not sure that there is really an end of chasing a sheep, and this thought makes me feel tired. 


  Even in the novel, the main character chased the sheep all the time, but after finding the sheep, he felt indescribable emptiness. When we came back to reality, the fact that we chased the sheep feels like a dream, which makes us feel empty. This feeling comes from the gap between reality and ideal. Sometimes, an ideal can become a reality, but that moment is too short. I think in this adventure chasing a sheep, we have to try not to lose ourselves, our genuine goal and passion.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 3_1: Confessions by Kanae Minato (#5 points)

   The main background of ‘Confessions’ is a normal school. The homeroom teacher, Yuko, says her four-year-old daughter is murdered by her class at the school where she works. The story begins with the teacher confessing this murder case like a speech in front of her students on the day of the closing ceremony. Yuko is the parent who lost her daughter and couldn’t protect her daughter, and at the same time, she is a teacher who has a duty to guide her students in the right way. She confesses about the law and order, ethics, and moral ideas in a calm and grim tone, in front of the criminals in her class who killed her daughter. Everyone is quietly holding their breath.  The incident begins with the death of Yuko's only four-year-old daughter, Manami. Manami was found drowned in the pool, but in fact, it was done by Yuko's students Naoki and Shuya. Shuya wanted to get his mother's attention by killing Manami, and Naoki pushed Manami into the pool to show Shuya, who i...
Post a Comment
Read more

Final Point Total

Week 1: Frankenstien by Mary Shelly (#6 points) Week 2: Interview with a Vampire by Anne Rice (#6 points) Week 3: A Wild Sheep Chase (#6 points) Week 3_1: Confessions by Kanae Minato (#5 points) Week 4: Annihilation (#6 points) Week 6: The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (#6 points) Week 7: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (#6 points) Week Eight: Contemporary Fantasy - Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Suzanna Clark (# 6 points) Week Nine: New Frontier - The Martian by Andrew Weir (# 5 points) Week Ten: The Fiction of Ideas - The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuinn (# 5 points) Week Eleven: Cyberpunk and Steampunk - Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (# 6 points) Week Thirteen: Literature and Speculation - Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (# 6 points) Week Fourteen: Speculative Satire - Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (# 6 points) Week Fifteen: Future Tense - Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (# 5 points)  Total Point from reading: 80 Attendance: 13 < 2 absence...
Post a Comment
Read more

Week Fourteen: Speculative Satire - Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (# 6 points)

  A huge joke on a cosmic scale!  I think if I define Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in one sentence, it seems like this can be said. The book is full of humor and jokes. The author is expressing his ingenious imagination regardless of any form and authority. In this book, things like the logical rationale and the probability of the story are not important. Unlike hard Science Fiction, which elaborately unfolds a story based on scientific theory, the charm of this book lies in the writer’s imagination and humor. As we can see from the setting that the Earth is a supercomputer designed by a super-intelligent race, the book shows the adventure of countless unique people and events between space and Earth, and prehistoric times and 5.6 trillion years later.    Even the most entertaining jokes can get tired after hours of listening. To keep laughing and induce fun, we need a narrative device that will arouse the readers’ curiosity and tension...
Post a Comment
Read more