9/11/08 Haruki Murakami, "A Wild Sheep Chase"

One of the main reasons I enjoy reading Murakami’s “A Wild Sheep Chase” is that reminds me of one of my favorite authors, Paul Auster. While it is not quite an example of intertextuality, Murakami’s choice to turn his main character/narrator Boku into a hardboiled detective is similar to Auster’s “New York Trilogy,” while The Rat’s letter to Boku is reminiscent to the letter Fanshawe writes at the beginning of Auster’s “The Locked Room.” I also find Murakami’s use of tangents very entertaining. His obsessions with seemingly random objects—ears, slips, whale penises—and his over explanations are comparable to Auster, although Auster usually focuses on bowel movements or baseball. I find that these strange lengthy passages show that the “fearless detectives” are in fact nowhere near qualified to be detectives in the first place. Instead, the characters are made more regular—pardon the bowel pun—or realistic in that they go through thought processes similar to everyday people. Perhaps not so much as Boku’s ear and whale penis infatuation, but certainly his love for music. After all, when is the last time Dick Tracy talked about his latest bowel movement or Bogart expressed whale penis envy?