A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami Read Free Book Online Page A

days.”
    “Maybe so,” I said, crushing out a cigarette in the ashtray. “And no doubt there’s an innocent town somewhere where an innocent butcher slices innocent ham. So if you think that drinking whiskey from the middle of the morning is innocent, go ahead and drink as much as you want.”
    The room was treated to an extended pen-on-desktop staccato solo.
    “Sorry, I didn’t mean to say that.”
    “That’s okay,” said my partner. “I certainly can’t deny it.”
    The air conditioner thermostat made a funny noise. This was a terribly quiet afternoon.
    “Have some confidence in yourself,” I said. “Haven’t we made it this far on our own? With just the two of us. The only thing that separates us from all those precious success stories is they have backers and titles.”
    “And to think we used to be friends,” said my partner.
    “We’re still friends,” I said. “We’ve come all this way together.”
    “I didn’t want to see you get divorced.”
    “I know,” I said. “But what do you say we start talking about sheep?”
    He nodded. He placed the ballpoint pen back in its tray and rubbed his eyes.
    “It was eleven o’clock this morning when the man came,” my partner began.

Now the Strange Man
    It was eleven o’clock in the morning when the man came. Now there are two types of eleven-in-the-mornings for a small-scale company like ours. That is, either absolutely busy or absolutely unbusy. Nothing in between. So at eleven A.M. we are either mindlessly working up a flurry or we are mindlessly daydreaming. In-between tasks, should there be such an animal, we set aside for the afternoon.
    It was the latter sort of eleven A.M. when the man came. And a monumentally unbusy one at that. The first half of September had been insane, and then work fell flat off. Three of us took a month-delayed summer vacation, but even so the rest of the crew had been consigned to an agenda of pencil sharpening and other exciting tasks. My partner himself had stepped out to the bank to get a money draft, while someone else had repaired to the neighboring audio-equipment showroom to listen to new record releases. The secretary was left to answer the telephone as she thumbed through the “Autumn Hairstyles” pages of a women’s magazine.
    The man opened the door to the office without a sound, and heclosed it without a sound. Not that he made any conscious effort to move quietly. It was second nature to him. So much so the secretary had no awareness whatsoever of him. The man was all the way to her desk and peering down at her before she noticed him.
    “There is a matter I would like to take up with your employer,” said the man. He spoke as if running a white-gloved hand over a tabletop.
    What could have happened to bring him here? She looked up at the man. His eyes were too piercing for a business client, his attire too fastidious for a tax inspector, his air too intellectual for a policeman. Yet she could think of nothing else he could be. This man, a refined piece of bad news now hovering over her, had materialized out of nowhere.
    “I’m afraid he’s stepped out at the moment,” she said, slapping her magazine shut. “He said he’d be back in another thirty minutes.”
    “I’ll wait,” pronounced the man without a moment’s hesitation. A foregone conclusion, it seemed.
    She wondered whether to ask his name. She decided against it and simply conducted him to the reception area. The man took a seat on the sky-blue sofa, crossed his legs, peered up at the electric wall clock directly before him, and froze in position. He moved not an iota. When she brought him a glass of barley tea a bit later, he was in the exact same pose.
    “Right where you’re sitting now,” my partner said. “He sat there staring at the clock in the same position for a full thirty minutes.”
    I looked at the sofa where I was sitting, then looked up at the wall clock, then I looked back at my partner.

    Despite the unusually hot