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 Fifteen: Future Tense - Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (# 5 points)

  This week, I read Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. Overall, It was hard to read because there are a lot of characters in a story. The relationships between the characters keep increasing and get complicated, so sometimes it was a bit hard to follow the story. The view of the world and the characters the writer created are very fresh and unfamiliar as well. The new words like Fleet, Ancillaries, Nilt, and Radch pop up from the first page of this novel. At first, I needed time to get used to this new world, but at some point, I found myself empathizing with the speaker and experiencing the vast universe.  A first-person narrator of this story is artificial intelligence, Breq, who still thinks that there are a lot of incomprehensible behaviors humans do, although it has been living 19 years with a human body. Breq must follow the command of her creator, the Radch’s monarch,  but by a series of events, now she acts by her own free will. It can be read just as the er...
Post a Comment
Read more

Week Eleven: Cyberpunk and Steampunk - Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (# 6 points)

  The shock of using VR devices for the first time is still unforgettable. It’s still a little closer to the virtual side than to the real one, but it was still amazing. Since then, I have been interested in virtual reality and augmented reality, and have started to read related articles and books. It was difficult to fully understand, but I was convinced that the technology would gradually focus on making virtual realities more realistic. VR appeared in the mid-2010s, but there was someone who came up with this concept 20 years before this. It’s Neal Stephenson, the writer of ‘Snow Crash’, and the novel ’Snow Crash’ is a book that enables us to approach the world of virtual reality more easily.  Considering this book was published in 1992, I’m really surprised that the story described in this novel is almost close to the world right now, where a lot of Internet-related technologies have made remarkable development. ‘Metaverse’ the virtual place that the comput...
1 comment
Read more

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