Further Influence

  Hello Class, I’ve been appreciating the influence from previous works seen in Murakami’s writing, and I wanted to use this blog post to analyze another potential layer. We’ve discussed the influence of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness on the story of Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase . The stories both utilize the same motifs of obsessive pursuit of a mission with symbolic ambiguity and the main characters grappling with the instability of meaning. I believe these themes can be traced further back to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick . Moby Dick is even mentioned explicitly in Chapter 26 of A Wild Sheep Chase during the discussion with the desk clerk at the Dolphin Hotel. I also believe this influence led to the inclusion of Boku’s allusionary obsession with the whale genitalia in the aquarium. The elusive white whale can be seen as a precursor to the characters of Kurtz and the Sheep stripped of their respective political/societal themes. Conrad frames Kurtz within the context of imperialism...