A Wild Sheep Chase

In this chapter, we return to the narrator’s meeting with the Boss’s black-suited secretary. The narrator describes the secretary as expressionless, fastidious and elegant. He feels the same heavy, stultifying aura around the man that his partner had earlier described feeling, an aura which reminds him of death: “A silence reminiscent, though it took me a while to put my finger on it, of the silence that hangs around a terminal patient” (124).

The narrator and the secretary first engage in some careful sparring around the topic of the sheep photograph. The secretary offers to compensate the narrator for the losses incurred by the canceling of his ad campaign, if the narrator only reveals the photographer’s identity. The narrator refuses to do so, and the secretary then changes the subject to the sheep in the photograph. He gives the narrator a brief history of the role of sheep in modern-day Japan, telling him that it is an imported animal that has no real meaning in the country’s history, and that sheep in Japan are “a thoroughly regulated animal” (130). He then asks the narrator to reexamine his own sheep photograph with a magnifying glass: “‘Be sure to look carefully at the third sheep from the right in the front row’” (131).