The Long Goodbye & A Wild Sheep Chase

I ended up enjoying both of these stories. Initially, I liked The Long Goodbye more than the wild Sheep Chase. I perceived The Long Goodbye to be more grounded in reality, which seemed to make a more cohesive, and Marlowe was an interesting flawed character who put up a bravado of being a tough guy detached of emotions, which is clearly the exact opposite. I had first thought the A Wild Sheep Chase’s Boku was a little of a bland character who seemed to be going with the flow. But once he reached the end of his wild sheep chase it seemed that Boku had some form of emotional awakening. Because it seemed as if everything he had experienced had finally caught up to him. His company closing down, losing his girlfriend, his close friend dying in order to stop a sheep bent on dominating the world. Which really started when he looked himself in the mirror. 

    I noticed that the scene in which Loring leaves Marlowe and the emotion he experienced was similar to what Boku had experienced when his girlfriend had just upped and left him without a word. Though in the case of Boku, it left him in a touch of deep melancholy. Murakami also seemed to have included a reference to his story Mirror. As the mirror in A Wild Sheep Chase played a role in the story, allowing Boku to gain some semblance of self but also to see that sheep man was not real. 

    Overall both were interesting reads because The Long Goodbye had elements of noir and a hard-boiled detective, which were genres I’ve heard about but never read. A Wild Sheep Chase was a story that seemed to parody noir and the hard-boiled genre mix with a supernatural aspect to it.

Michael A. Landestoy