Week 3 - A Wild Sheep Chase (5)

     Throughout the course of reading this story, I kept thinking back to a quote you had mentioned in the week 3 assignment post that read: "The novels and films featured this week often embody a sense of the emptiness of contemporary life, representing a world in which the protagonists are having a great deal of trouble finding their place." I believe a lot can be said about expressing a sense of "emptiness" in A Wild Sheep Chase. My first example of this would be the lifestyle that the narrator existed in before taking off on his journey to find the sheep from the photograph. One thing I personally think about quite often as a digital artist, is the high probability that I could end up working in a similar "urban jungle" where my day to day life is constrained to getting to work in a studio somewhere downtown in a dense concrete infested city, working all day and then going back to whatever concrete box of an apartment I may have and repeating that cycle for years. Just as in this story, those days of sticking to the same almost "automated" routine transforms every day into a repeat of yesterday and before you know it years and years of your life have passed, and you didn't even stop to blink. 

    This strange and empty feeling of "emptiness" and "lack of placement in society" continued to be a common theme even after the narrator took on the adventure of finding the sheep with his girlfriend. Speaking of his girlfriend, this same theme came back into the narrators life after the first night in which the girlfriend mysteriously disappeared. What surprised me the most is the main character seemed quite unfazed by this, instead of stopping everything and searching endlessly for her, he chose to experience this same "emptiness and isolation," but in a very different light. 

    What I mean by this is that this feeling he experienced while in the city, was one that confined him to a robust schedule that gave him very little to no time to just stop for a moment, take a breath of fresh air, and smell the roses. While in comparison, this new isolation in the mountains in my opinion must have felt very "freeing" to the narrator. He even mentioned that in the days of camping out there, he would often take walks and simply enjoy being one with nature and the great outdoors, which must have been absolutely light and day compared to his old lifestyle. 

    Overall, I found this story to be very interesting, especially because I am not personally too familiar with Japanese cinema let alone Japanese Gothic and Horror. Despite the cultural differences, I felt that the narrator was a very relatable character compared with many Western cinema characters who are seen as "outcasts" because of their lack of social interaction with the rest of their world. However, this one differs through it's use of "spirits and ghosts" that took form through Rat and The Sheep Man. This made for some very surprising change of events throughout the narrative and ultimately made for a very first time taste of Japanese Gothic and Horror for myself.