A WILD SHEEP CHASE By Haruki Murakami. Translated by Alfred Birnbaum. 299 pp. New York: Kodansha International.
Sometimes I think America's most enduring contribution to literature is the hard-boiled detective story. Created by Raymond Chandler, elaborated by Ross Macdonald and perpetuated by successors like Robert Parker, the genre reinvents itself from generation to generation in the United States, always wearing the traditional trappings. Europeans, Latin Americans, and now the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami are more attracted to the metaphysical aspect of the category, making use of its depiction of humanity's existential predicament and paying less attention to rapidly paced plot and violent death.
Although he is not a professional detective but an amateur who has a case dropped in his lap, the unnamed narrator of A Wild Sheep Chase has some of the traits of a younger, cooler Philip Marlowe. A heavy smoker and a steady drinker who records every drink and every cigarette he takes, he has a barely furnished apartment, an almost empty refrigerator and minimal connections with the human race. Better anesthetized than Marlowe (whose bleeding heart usually shows through), Mr. Murakami's protagonist has developed a talent for numbing his feelings. ''Most people,'' he muses, ''they're trying to escape from boredom, but I'm trying to get into the thick of boredom.''
There is plenty to numb himself against: a failed marriage; a job turning out meaningless fluff for an advertising agency; the realities of present-day Japan - overcrowded, overdeveloped, its traditions and its natural landscape disappearing. His own hometown is unrecognizable: all but 50 yards of oceanfront have been occupied by ''gravestone rows of tall buildings.'' He is just shy of 30, too young to give up on everything, too smart to have anything but contempt for ambitions and illusions. Like his hard-boiled predecessors, he learns to stare meaninglessness in the face, raising the pursuit of boredom to a high art. ''I've memorized,'' he tells us, ''all the murderers' names in every Ellery Queen mystery ever written.''
What is the opposite of boredom? Adventure. Life is the enemy of stasis; as long as the heart keeps on pumping, life keeps on tossing out challenges, even to the tough guy, waving visions of hope and purpose under his nose. Adventure waylays Mr. Murakami's narrator, sending him first a young woman with beautiful, paranormally endowed ears and then the sinister, black-suited lieutenant of a dying right-wing boss, who threatens him into accepting a case.
What is this case? To find a sheep with a chestnut-colored star on its back, a sheep that holds the key to the survival of the boss and his empire. Forty-odd years before, this anomalous sheep had mysteriously implanted itself in the boss's brain and taken over his will. ''This all has got to be, patently, the most unbelievable, the most ridiculous story I have ever heard,'' protests the narrator. From here on in, reader and narrator enter the country of myth and fairy tale. The detective on a case has turned into a hero on a quest.
The hard-boiled detective is the dark side of the classical hero. The detective remains imprisoned in the underworld. He can rescue others, but he cannot save himself. The hero goes down into the underworld (his own depths or their mythic counterpart) and makes his way painfully back to the surface, armed with new knowledge. Mr. Murakami's narrator takes to the hero's role like a duck to water. He bounds forward on greased skids at first, with the aid of the sort of magical helpers dear to myth: unlimited cash from the lieutenant; his girlfriend's psychic powers; the fortuitous discovery of the Sheep Professor, an old man who has kept detailed records of the nation's now moribund sheep-raising industry. Pointed toward the island of Hokkaido, as much of a wilderness as still exists in Japan, he undergoes the hero's mandatory ordeals: traversing a passageway between a crumbling mountain and a knife-edged cliff; enduring a hermit's solitude and a dangerous fever; receiving visitations from the dead. Through the offices of a spirit guide, the mystery of the sheep is penetrated. The sheep represents the will to power over change, time and death, an inhuman power that dehumanizes infinitely.
But the hero's return to the world is as painful as his descent. On the way back, he realizes that his former self was a poor man's version of the boss. Instead of gaining power over life by trying to control it, he had tried to control life by refusing to live it. Henceforward, his task is to become fully alive and to accept suffering - in other words, to sit on that last 50 yards of shoreline and be able to weep.
What is Haruki Murakami's special magic? How does he keep us involved in this wild sheep chase, all the way to the bitter end? Without question, he has help from Alfred Birnbaum, who seems more like his spiritual twin than merely his translator. Reading primitive and ancient myths in the late 1980's can seem like an artificial exercise, even with Joseph Campbell's much popularized reminders that they hold the clue to our salvation both as individuals and as a species. We knit our brows striving to identify with Shiva or with the Navajo Spider Woman. But in Haruki Murakami's tale we are on our own despoiled modern turf (a turf as international as it is locally Japanese), hearing our own irreverent colloquial language, the Esperanto of the postatomic generation.
Now living in Rome, Mr. Murakami is the author of six novels, three of which have been runaway best sellers in Japan. With A Wild Sheep Chase he is making his debut in America, and his work is bound to find an audience here. Haruki Murakami is a mythmaker for the millennium, a wiseacre wise man.