Chandler and Murakami's Detachment from Reality

     It was incredibly fascinating to read The Long Goodbye and A Wild Sheep Chase simultaneously. Although I had read this Murakami novel in the past, I had never considered its relation to detective novels, but Raymond Chandler's influence on Murakami became increasingly clear as I read through these books. Both Chandler's character of Phillip Marlowe and Murakami's protagonist, Boku, have a noticeable detachment to the events and other characters surrounding them. This aspect of both characters seems to allow them to perform extremely time-consuming or stressful tasks, such as Marlowe's late night visits to the Wade household to deal with familial issues or Boku's treacherous journey up to and subsequent multi-week long isolation in the mountain home. It is also clear that Murakami either admired or was at least inspired by Marlowe's disinterest in receiving payment for these tedious and difficult jobs. While Marlowe never spends the money that Terry Lennox sends him or accepts any checks from his clients, Boku responds similarly by gifting his check to J after the Boss's secretary pays him. 

    Although the influence is clear, Murakami strays so far off the beaten path of the search-and-find detective novel genre through his mind-bending metaphysical story elements. In the same way that Marlowe will describe a beautiful blonde woman as being intoxicating and enticing, Boku will spend pages on the description of his girlfriend's ears and how every person in the restaurant becomes entranced by them and their "special powers". In the final chapters of A Wild Sheep Chase, entire known rules of reality are broken when The Rat finally arrives at the house and reveals that he died several weeks earlier and took the form of The Sheep Man whose reflection was starkly missing from the living room mirror. Because of the juxtaposition of these elements with the grounded familiar reality of The Long Goodbye, these twists hit even harder than they did for me when first reading Murakami. Although the similarities are many, the major genre differences between the novels were what made me enjoy both of them even more than I would have reading them separately. 

- May Painter