Free Will in A Wild Sheep Chase

After finishing Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase, I was stuck on the idea of free will. The phrase “free will” comes up when the secretary admits to Boku that “‘I wanted you to come all this way spontaneously of your own free will’” (Murakami 346). The irony behind the secretary’s statement is that he threatened Boku in order to push him into pursuing the journey; thus, it can be said that Boku would not have pursued the sheep chase if he weren’t approached by the secretary first. The illusion of free will, in this case, points to a larger idea that perhaps we are not in control of everything we do.  Without knowing what was at the end of the search, Boku embarks on his sheep chase, only to find out at the end that the secretary already knew everything about the sheep and was using Boku in order to catch the sheep. While Boku thought he was leading the search, it turns out that he was just a tool used to carry out an already complex plan. Boku’s lack of knowledge about the situation was actually his greatest strength, even though he himself thought it was his greatest weakness.

The secretary also associated “free will” with “blank slate”—  this reminded me of the  famous philosophy “tabula rasa,” which states that everyone is born without pre-determined traits and knowledge and our self is developed solely based on our experiences.  From all of this, I started to wonder if the ending of A Wild Sheep Chase was a sort of rebirth for Boku.  While searching for the sheep, his sense of reality is altered as he learns and experiences  magical elements that don’t seem to fit into his knowledge of the world. While looking at the mirror in the Rat’s house, Boku brings up the concept of “free will” and contemplates who is “real”: the person looking at the mirror, or the person looking back in the reflection (Murakami 319).  His brief identity crisis with his reflection in the mirror shows how the sheep chase has driven him to question even his own sense self. A reflection in the mirror supposedly has no free will, as it only exists to mimic our real self. Despite this, Boku wonders if our free will is only an illusion, and if the reflection in the mirror is what is “real.” The ending of the novel struck me as quite odd as well, since Boku was not one to be emotional about anything, yet the book ends with him crying by himself. This surprising show of emotions perhaps suggests that we as readers don’t truly know the “real” Boku, despite having followed him on this journey. 

-Michelle Han