A Wild Sheep Chase

The sheep that the narrator is searching for is described in vague but foreboding terms, by the people whom it has inhabited. The Rat tells the narrator that the sheep desires “a realm of total conceptual anarchy”(225); the Sheep Professor tells him that the sheep has “[a] monumental plan to transform humanity and the human world” (223). The Boss’s secretary–speaking for the Boss, who has also been inhabited by the sheep–tells the narrator that the sheep is “a v-e-r-y special sheep” (144).

Ordinary farm sheep also appear in this novel, and the narrator finds something eerie in their blankness and stolidity: “Their eyes were an unnatural blue, looking like tiny wellsprings flowing from the sides of their heads […] They all stared at me. They seemed to think as a group” (257-58). Sheep are the ultimate herd animal, and are not known for their individual will, let alone for the sort of ultimate will that the Rat and the Sheep Professor describe. They are also an animal that is non-indigenous to Japan, and that never quite thrived in Japan; in this way, they are a reminder of some of the country’s failings and missteps.