A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami

Author:Haruki Murakami [Murakami, Haruki]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Published: 2011-07-21T05:00:00+00:00

P A R T S E V E N

THE DOLPHIN HOTEL AFFAIR

25

Transit Completed at Movie Theater;

On to the Dolphin Hotel

The entire flight, she sat by the window and looked down at the scenery. I sat next to her reading my Adventures o f Sherlock Holmes. Not a single cloud in the sky the whole time, the airplane riding on its shadow over the earth. Or more accurately, since we were in the plane, our shadows figured as well inside the shadow of the airplane skimming over mountain and field. Which would mean we too were imprinted into the earth. "I really liked that guy," she said after drinking her orange juice. "That guy who?" "The chauffeur." "Hmm," I said, "I liked him too." "And what a great name, 'Kipper.'"

"For sure. A great name. The cat might be better off with him than he ever was with me." "Not 'the cat,'

'Kipper.'" "Right. 'Kipper.'"

"Why didn't you give the cat a name all this time?"

"Why indeed," I puzzled. Then I lit up a cigarette with the sheep-engraved lighter. "I think I just don't like names. Basically, I can't see what's wrong with calling me 'me' or you 'you' or us 'us' or them 'them.'"

"Hmm," she said. "I do like the word 'we,' though. It has an Ice Age ring to it." "Ice Age?"

"Like 'We go south' or 'We hunt mammoth' or. . . " When we stepped outside at Chitose Airport, the air was chillier than we'd expected. I pulled a denim shirt over my T-shirt, she a knit vest over her shirt. Autumn had come over this land one whole month

ahead of Tokyo.

"We weren't supposed to run into an Ice Age, were we?" she asked on the bus to Sapporo. "You hunting mammoths, me raising children."

"Sounds positively inviting," I said. She soon fell asleep, leaving me gazing through the bus windows at the endless procession of deep forest on both sides of the road.

We hit a coffee shop first thing on arriving in the city.

"Right off, let's set our prime directives," I said.

"We'll have to divide up. That is, I go after the scene in the photograph. You go after the sheep. That way we save time."

"Very pragmatic."

"If things go well," I amended. "In any case, you can cover the major former sheep ranches of

Hokkaido and study up on sheep breeds. You can

probably find what you need at a government office or the local library."

"I like libraries," she said.

"I'm glad."

"Do I start right away?"

I looked at my watch. Three-thirty. "Nah, it's already getting late. Let's start tomorrow. Today we'll take it easy, find a place to stay, have dinner, take a bath, and get some sleep."

"I wouldn't mind seeing a movie," she said.

"A movie?"

"What with all that time we saved by flying." "Good point," I said. So we popped into the first movie theater that caught our eye.

What we ended up seeing was a crime-occult

double feature. There was hardly a soul in the place. It'd been ages since I'd been in a theater that empty.

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