A Wild Sheep Chase

Transit Completed at Movie Theater; On to the Dolphin Hotel

The entire flight, she sat by the window and looked down at the scenery. I sat next to her reading my Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Not a single cloud in the sky the whole time, the airplane riding on its shadow over the earth. Or more accurately, since we were in the plane, our shadows figured as well inside the shadow of the airplane skimming over mountain and field. Which would mean we too were imprinted into the earth.

“I really liked that guy,” she said after drinking her orange juice.

“That guy who?”

“The chauffeur.”

“Hmm,” I said, “I liked him too.”

“And what a great name, ‘Kipper.’”

“For sure. A great name. The cat might be better off with him than he ever was with me.”

“Not ‘the cat,’ ‘Kipper.’”

“Right. ‘Kipper.’”

“Why didn’t you give the cat a name all this time?”

“Why indeed,” I puzzled. Then I lit up a cigarette with the sheep-engraved lighter. “I think I just don’t like names. Basically, I can’t see what’s wrong with calling me ‘me’ or you ‘you’ or us ‘us’ or them ‘them.’”

“Hmm,” she said. “I do like the word ‘we,’ though. It has an Ice Age ring to it.”

“Ice Age?”

“Like ‘We go south’ or ‘We hunt mammoth’ or …”

When we stepped outside at Chitose Airport, the air was chillier than we’d expected. I pulled a denim shirt over my T-shirt, she a knit vest over her shirt. Autumn had come over this land one whole month ahead of Tokyo.

“We weren’t supposed to run into an Ice Age, were we?” she asked on the bus to Sapporo. “You hunting mammoths, me raising children.”

“Sounds positively inviting,” I said.

She soon fell asleep, leaving me gazing through the bus windows at the endless procession of deep forest on both sides of the road.

We hit a coffee shop first thing on arriving in the city.

“Right off, let’s set our prime directives,” I said. “We’ll have to divide up. That is, I go after the scene in the photograph. You go after the sheep. That way we save time.”

“Very pragmatic.”

“If things go well,” I amended. “In any case, you can cover the major former sheep ranches of Hokkaido and study up on sheep breeds. You can probably find what you need at a government office or the local library.”

“I like libraries,” she said.

“I’m glad.”

“Do I start right away?”

I looked at my watch. Three-thirty. “Nah, it’s already getting late. Let’s start tomorrow. Today we’ll take it easy, find a place to stay, have dinner, take a bath, and get some sleep.”

“I wouldn’t mind seeing a movie,” she said.

“A movie?”

“What with all that time we saved by flying.”

“Good point,” I said. So we popped into the first movie theater that caught our eye.

What we ended up seeing was a crime-occult double feature. There was hardly a soul in the place. It’d been ages since I’d been in a theater that empty. I counted the people in the audience to pass the time. Eight, including ourselves. There were more characters in the films.

The films were exemplars of the dreadful. The sort of films where you feel like turning around and walking out the instant the title comes on after the roaring MGM lion. Amazing that films like that exist.

The first was the occult feature. The devil, who lives in the dripping, dank cellar of the town church and manipulates things through the weak preacher, takes over the town. The real question, though, was why the devil wanted to take over the town to begin with. All it was was a miserable nothing of a few blocks surrounded by cornfields.

Nonetheless, the devil had this terrible obsession with the town and grew furious that one last little girl refused to fall under his spell. When the devil got mad, his body shook like quivering green jelly. Admittedly, there was something endearing about that rage.

In front of us a middle-aged man was snoring away like a foghorn. To the extreme right there was some heavy petting in progress. Behind, someone let out a huge fart. Huge enough to stop the middle-aged man’s snoring for a moment. A pair of high school girls giggled.

By reflex, I thought of Kipper. And it was only when I did that it came to me that we’d really left Tokyo and were now in Sapporo.

Funny about that.

Amid these thoughts I fell asleep. In my dreams, I encountered that green devil, but he wasn’t endearing in the least. He remained silent and I just observed his machinations.

Meanwhile, the film ended, the lights came on, and I woke up. Each member of the audience yawned as if in predetermined order. I went to the snack bar and bought ice cream for us. It was hard as a rock, probably left over from last summer.

“You slept through the whole thing?”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “How was it?”

“Pretty interesting. In the end, the whole town explodes.”

“Wow.”

The movie theater was deathly quiet. Or rather everything around us was deathly quiet. Not a common occurrence.

“Say,” she said, “doesn’t it seem like your body’s in a state of transit or something?”

Now that she mentioned it, it actually did.

She held my hand. “Let’s just stay like this. I’m worried.”

“Okay.”

“Unless we stay like this, we might get transported somewhere else. Someplace crazy.”

As the theater interior grew dark again and the coming attractions began, I brushed her hair aside and kissed her ear. “It’s all right. Don’t worry.”

“You’re probably right,” she said softly. “I guess we should have ridden in transportation with names after all.”

For the next hour and a half, from the beginning to the end of the film, we stayed in a state of quiet transport in the darkness. Her head resting on my shoulder the whole time. My shoulder became warm and damp from her breath.

We came out of the movie theater and strolled the twilit streets, my arm around her shoulder. We felt closer than ever before. The commotion of passersby was comforting; faint stars were shining through in the sky.

“Are we really in the right city, the two of us?” she asked.

I looked up at the sky. The polestar was in the right position, but somehow it looked like a fake polestar. Too big, too bright.

“I wonder,” I said.

“I feel like something’s out of place,” she said.

“That’s what it’s like, coming to a new city. Your body can’t quite get used to it.”

“But after a while you do get used to it, don’t you?”

“After two or three days, you’ll be fine,” I said.

When we tired of walking, we went into the first restaurant we saw, drank draft beer, and ordered some salmon and potatoes. We’d walked in willy-nilly off the street and gotten lucky. The beer really hit the spot, and the food was actually good.

“Well then,” I said after coffee, “what say we settle on a place to stay?”

“I’ve already got an image of a place,” she said.

“Like what?”

“Never mind. Get a list of hotels and read off the names in order.”

I asked a waiter to bring over the yellow pages and started reading the names listed in the “Hotels, Inns” section. After forty names, she stopped me.

“That’s the one.”

“Which one?”

“The last one you read.”

“Dolphin Hotel,” I said.

“That’s where we’re staying.”

“Never heard of it.”

“But I can’t see us staying at any other hotel.”

I returned the phone book, then called the Dolphin Hotel. A man with an indistinct voice answered, indicating they had double and single rooms available. And did they have other types of rooms besides doubles and singles? No. Doubles and singles were all. Confused, I reserved a double. The price: forty percent less than what I’d expected.

The Dolphin Hotel was located three blocks west and one block south of the movie theater we’d gone to. A small place, totally undistinguished. Its undistinguishedness was metaphysical. No neon sign, no large signboard, not even a real entryway. The glass front door, which resembled an employees’ kitchen entrance, had next to it only a copper plate engraved with DOLPHIN HOTEL. Not even a picture of a dolphin.

The building was five stories tall, but it might as well have been a giant matchbox stood on end. It wasn’t particularly old; still it was strikingly run-down. Most likely it was run-down when it was built.

This was our Dolphin Hotel.

Yet she apparently fell in love with the place the moment she set eyes on it.

“Not a bad hotel, eh?” she said.

“Not bad?” I tossed back her words.

“Cozy, no frills.”

“No frills,” I repeated. “By frills, I’m sure you mean clean sheets or a sink that doesn’t leak or an air conditioner that works or reasonably soft toilet paper or fresh soap or curtains that prevent sunstroke.”

“You always look at the dark side of things,” she laughed. “Anyway, we didn’t come here as tourists.”

On opening the door, I found the lobby bigger than expected. In the middle of it was a set of parlor furniture and a large color TV; there was a quiz show on. Not a soul was in sight.

Large potted ornamentals sat on both sides of the front door, their leaves faded, nearly brown. I stood there taking everything in. The lobby was actually a lot less spacious than it had initially seemed. It appeared large because there were so few pieces of furniture. The parlor set, a grandfather clock, and a mirror. Nothing else.

I walked over and checked out the clock and mirror. Both were commemorative presents of some event or another. The clock was seven minutes off; the mirror made my head crooked on my body.

The parlor set was about as run-down as the hotel itself. The sofa was an unappealing orange, the sort of orange you’d get by leaving a choicely sunburnt weaving out in the rain for a week, then throwing it into the cellar until it mildewed. This was an orange from the early days of Technicolor.

On closer inspection, a balding middle-aged man lay, stretched out like a dried fish, asleep on the parlor set chaise longue. At first, I thought he was dead, but his nose twitched. There were the indentations of eyeglasses on the bridge of his nose, but no glasses anywhere. Which would mean that he hadn’t fallen asleep while watching television. It didn’t make sense.

I stood at the front desk and peeked over the counter. Nobody there. She rang the bell. It chimed across the expanse of lobby.

We waited thirty seconds and got no response. The man on the chaise longue didn’t stir.

She rang the bell again.

Now the man on the chaise longue grunted. A self-accusing grunt. Then he opened his eyes and looked us over vacantly.

She gave the bell a third, serious ring.

The man sprang up and dashed across the lobby. He edged by me and went behind the counter. He was the desk clerk.

“Terrible of me,” he said. “Really terrible of me. Fell asleep waiting for you.”

“Sorry to wake you,” I said.

“Not at all,” said the desk clerk. He brought out a registration card and a ballpoint pen. He was missing the tips of the little and middle fingers on his left hand.

I wrote my name on the card but had second thoughts and crumpled it up and stuffed it in my pocket. I took another card and wrote a fake name and a fake address. An ordinary name and address, but not bad for a spur-of-the-moment name and address. I put down my occupation as real estate.

The desk clerk picked up his thick celluloid-rimmed glasses from beside the telephone and peered intently at the registration card.

“Suginami, Tokyo, … 29 years old, realtor.”

I took a tissue from my pocket and wiped the ink from my fingers.

“Here on business?” asked the clerk.

“Uh, sort of,” I said.

“How many nights?”

“One month,” I said.

“One month?” He gave me a blank-white-sheet-of-drawing-paper look. “You’ll be staying here one whole month?”

“Is there something wrong with that?”

“No, uh, nothing wrong, but well, we like to settle up payment three days at a time.”

I set my satchel on the floor, counted out twenty ten-thousand-yen notes, and laid them on the counter.

“There’s more if that runs out,” I said.

The clerk scooped up the bills with the three fingers of his left hand and counted them with his right. Then he made out a receipt. “Would there be anything special you might care to see in the way of a room?”

“A corner room away from the elevator, if possible.”

The clerk turned around and squinted at the keyboard. After much ado, he chose room 406. The keyboard was almost entirely full. A real success story, the Dolphin Hotel.

There was no such thing as a bellboy, so we carried our bags to the elevator. As she said, no frills. The elevator shook like a large dog with lung disease.

“For an extended stay, there’s nothing like your small, basic hotel.”

“Your small, basic hotel”—not a bad turn of phrase. Like something from the travel pages of a women’s fashion magazine: “After a long trip, your small, basic hotel is just the thing.”

Nonetheless, the first thing I did upon opening the door to our small, basic hotel room was to grab a slipper to smash a cockroach that was creeping along the window frame. Then I picked up two pubic hairs lying by the foot of the bed and disposed of them in the trash. A new experience for me, seeing a cockroach in Hokkaido. Meanwhile, she ran the bath to temperature. And believe me, it was one noisy faucet.

“I tell you, we should’ve stayed in a better hotel,” I opened the bathroom door and yelled in her direction. “We’ve got more than enough money.”

“It’s not a question of money. Our sheep hunt begins here. No argument, it had to be here.”

I stretched out on the bed and smoked a cigarette, switched on the television and ran through all the channels, then turned it off. The only thing decent was the reception. Presently, the bathwater stopped and her clothes came flying out, followed by the sound of the hand shower.

Parting the window curtains, I looked out across the way onto a sordid menagerie of buildings every bit as incomprehensible as our Dolphin Hotel. Each one a dingy ash gray and reeking of piss just by their looks. Although it was already nine o’clock, I could see people in the few lit windows, busily working away. I couldn’t tell what line of work it was, but none of them looked terribly happy. Of course, to their eyes, I probably looked a bit forlorn too.

I drew the curtains shut and returned to the bed, rolled over on the hard-as-asphalt starched sheets, and thought about my ex-wife. I thought about the man she was living with now. I knew almost everything there was to know about him. He’d been my friend, after all, so why shouldn’t I know? Twenty-seven years old. A not very well-known jazz guitarist, but regular enough as not very well-known jazz guitarists go. Not a bad guy. No style, though. One year he’d drift between Kenny Burrell and B.B. King, another year between Larry Coryell and Jim Hall.

Why she’d up and choose him after me, I couldn’t figure. Granted, you can pick out certain characteristics among individuals. Yet the only thing he had over me was that he could play guitar, and the only thing I had over him was that I could wash dishes. Most guitarists can’t wash dishes. Ruin their fingers and there goes everything.

Then I found myself thinking about sex with her. By default, I tried to calculate the number of times we’d had sex in our four years of married life. An approximate count at best, and admittedly, what would be the point of an approximate count? I should have kept a diary. Or at least made some mark in a notebook. That way I’d have an accurate figure. Accurate figures give things a sense of reality.

My ex-wife kept precise records about sex. Not that she kept a diary per se. She recorded in a notebook exact data about her periods from her first year on and included sex as a supplementary reference. Altogether there were eight of these notebooks, all kept in a locked drawer together with important papers and photographs. These she showed to no one. That she kept records about sex is the full extent of my knowledge. What and how much she wrote, I have no idea. And now that we’re no longer together, I’ll probably never know.

“If I die,” she told me, “burn these notebooks. Douse them in kerosene and let them burn till ash, then bury them. I’d never forgive you if one word remained.”

“But I’m the one who’s been sleeping with you. I pretty much know every inch of your body. What’s there to be ashamed of at this late date?”

“Body cells replace themselves every month. Even at this very moment,” she said, thrusting a skinny back of her hand before my eyes. “Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.”

The woman—save for the month or so prior to our divorce—was singularly methodical in her thinking. She had an absolutely realistic grasp on her life. Which is to say that no door once closed ever opened again, nor as a rule was any door left wide open.

Now all I know about her is my memories of her. And these memories fade further and further into the distance like displaced cells. Now I have no way of knowing precisely how many times she and I had sex.

Enter the Sheep Professor

We woke the next morning at eight, donned our clothes, headed down in the elevator, and out to a nearby coffee shop for breakfast. No, the Dolphin Hotel had no coffee shop.

“Like I said yesterday, we’ll split up,” I said, passing her a copy of the sheep photo. “I’ll use the mountains in the background as a handle toward searching out the place. You’ll research places where they raise sheep. You know what to do. Any clue, anything, it doesn’t matter how small, is fine. Anything is an improvement over scouring the entire island of Hokkaido totally blind.”

“I’m fine. Leave it up to me.”

“Okay, let’s meet back at the hotel in the evening.”

“Don’t worry so much,” she said, putting on sunglasses. “Finding it’s going to be a piece of cake.”

Of course, it was no piece of cake. Things never happen that way. I went to the Territorial Tourist Agency, did the rounds of various tourist information centers and travel agents, inquired at the Mountaineering Association. In general, I checked all the places that had anything to do with tourism and mountains. Nobody could recall ever having seen the mountains in the photograph.

“They’re such ordinary-looking mountains too,” they all said. “Besides, the photo shows only a small part of them.”

One whole day on the pavement and that was about as close to progress as I got. That is, the realization that it’d be difficult to identify mountains with nothing to distinguish them and with only a partial view of them.

I stopped into a bookstore and bought The Mountains of Hokkaido and a Hokkaido atlas, then went into a café, had two ginger ales, and skimmed through my purchases. As far as mountains were concerned, there was an unbelievable number in Hokkaido, all of them about the same in color and in shape. I tried comparing the mountains in the Rat’s photograph with every mountain in the book; after ten minutes, I was dizzy. It was no comfort to learn that the number of mountains in the book represented but a tiny fraction of all the mountains in Hokkaido. Complicated by the fact that a mountain viewed from one angle gave a wholly different impression than from another angle.

“Mountains are living things,” wrote the author in his preface to the book. “Mountains, according to the angle of view, the season, the time of day, the beholder’s frame of mind, or any one thing, can effectively change their appearance. Thus, it is essential to recognize that we can never know more than one side, one small aspect of a mountain.”

“Just great,” I said out loud. An impossible task. At the five o’clock bell, I went out to sit on a park bench and eat corn with the pigeons.

Her efforts at information gathering fared better than mine, but ultimately they were futile too. We compared notes of the day’s trials and tribulations over a modest dinner at a restaurant behind the Dolphin Hotel.

“The Livestock Section of the Territorial Government knew next to nothing,” she said. “They’ve stopped keeping track of sheep. It doesn’t pay to raise sheep. At least not by large-scale ranching or free-range grazing.”

“In a way that makes the search easier.”

“Not really. Ranchers still raise sheep quite actively and even have their own union, which the authorities keep tabs on. With middle-and small-scale sheep raising, however, it’s difficult to keep any accurate count going. Everyone keeps a few sheep pretty much like they do cats and dogs. For what it’s worth, I took down the addresses of the thirty sheep raisers they had listings for, but the papers were four years old and people move around a lot in four years. Japan’s agricultural policies change every three years just like that, you know.”

“Just great,” I sighed into my beer. “Seems like we’ve come to a dead end. There must be more than a hundred similar mountains in Hokkaido, and the state of sheep raising is a total blank.”

“This is the first day. We’ve only just begun.”

“Haven’t those ears of yours gotten the message yet?”

“No message for the time being,” she said, eating her simmered fish and miso soup. “That much I know. I only get despairing messages when I’m confused or feeling some mental pinch. But that’s not the case now.”

“The lifeline only comes when you’re on the verge of drowning?”

“Right. For the moment, I’m satisfied to be going through all this with you, and as long as I’m satisfied, I get no such message. So it’s up to us to find that sheep on our own.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “In a sense, if we don’t find that sheep we’ll be up to our necks in it. In what, I can’t say, but if those guys say they’re going to get us, they’re going to get us. They’re pros. No matter if the Boss dies, the organization will remain and their network extends everywhere in Japan, like the sewers. They’ll have our necks. Dumb as it sounds, that’s the way it is.”

“Sounds like The Invaders.”

“Ridiculous, I know. But the fact is we’ve gotten ourselves smack in the middle of it, and by ‘ourselves’ I mean you and me. At the start it was only me, but by now you’re in the picture too. Still feel like you’re not on the verge of drowning?”

“Hey, this is just the sort of thing I love. Let me tell you, it’s more fun than sleeping with strangers or flashing my ears or proofreading biographical dictionaries. This is living.”

“Which is to say,” I interjected, “we’re not drowning so we have no rope.”

“Right. It’s up to us to find that sheep. Neither you nor I have left so much behind, really.”

Maybe not.

We returned to the hotel and had intercourse. I like that word intercourse. It poses only a limited range of possibilities.

Our third and fourth days in Sapporo came and went for naught. We’d get up at eight, have breakfast, split up for the day, and when evening came we’d exchange information over supper, return to the hotel, have intercourse, and sleep.

I threw away my old tennis shoes, bought new sneakers, and went around showing the photograph to hundreds of people. She made up a long list of sheep raisers based on sources from the government offices and the library, and started phoning every one of them. The results were nil. Nobody could place the mountain, and no sheep raiser had any recollection of a sheep with a star on its back. One old man said he remembered seeing that mountain in southern Sakhalin before the war. I wasn’t about to believe that the Rat had gone to Sakhalin. No way can you send a letter special delivery from Sakhalin to Tokyo.

Gradually, I was getting worn down. My sense of direction had evaporated by our fourth day. When south became opposite east, I bought a compass, but going around with a compass only made the city seem less and less real. The buildings began to look like backdrops in a photography studio, the people walking the streets like cardboard cutouts. The sun rose from one side of a featureless land, shot up in a cannonball arc across the sky, then set on the other side.

The fifth, then the sixth day passed. October lay heavy on the town. The sun was warm enough but the wind grew brisk, and by late in the day I’d have to put on a thin cotton windbreaker. The streets of Sapporo were wide and depressingly straight. Up until then, I’d had no idea how much walking around in a city of nothing but straight lines can tire you out.

I drank seven cups of coffee a day, took a leak every hour. And slowly lost my appetite.

“Why don’t you put an ad in the papers?” she proposed. “You know, ‘Friends want to get in touch with you’ or something.”

“Not a bad idea,” I said. It didn’t matter if we came up empty-handed; it had to beat doing nothing.

So I placed a three-line notice in the morning editions of four newspapers for the following day.

Attention: Rat

Get in touch. Urgent!

Dolphin Hotel, Room 406

For the next two days, I waited by the phone. The day of the ad there were three calls. One was a call from a local citizen.

“What’s this ‘Rat’?”

“The nickname of a friend,” I answered.

He hung up, satisfied.

Another was a prank call.

“Squeak, squeak,” came a voice from the other end of the line. “Squeak, squeak.”

I hung up. Cities are damn strange places.

The third was from a woman with a reedy voice.

“Everybody always calls me Rat,” she said. A voice in which you could almost hear the telephone lines swaying in the distant breeze.

“Thank you for taking the trouble to call. However, the Rat I’m looking for is a man,” I explained.

“I kind of thought so,” she said. “But in any case, since I’m a Rat too, I thought I might as well give you a call.”

“Really, thank you very much.”

“Not at all. Have you found your friend?”

“Not yet,” I said, “unfortunately.”

“If only it’d been me you were looking for … but no, it wasn’t me.

“That’s the way it goes. Sorry.”

She fell silent. Meanwhile, I scratched my nose with my little finger.

“Really, I just wanted to talk to you,” she came back.

“With me?”

“I don’t quite know how to put it, but I fought the urge ever since I came across your ad in the morning paper. I didn’t mean to bother you …”

“So all that about your being called Rat was a made-up story.”

“That’s right,” she said. “Nobody ever calls me Rat. I don’t even have any friends. That’s why I wanted to call you so badly.”

I heaved a sigh. “Well, uh, thanks anyway.”

“Forgive me. Are you from Hokkaido?”

“I’m from Tokyo,” I said.

“You came all the way from Tokyo to look for your friend?”

“That’s correct.”

“How old is this friend?”

“Just turned thirty.”

“And you?”

“I’ll be thirty in two months.”

“Single?”

“Yes.”

“I’m twenty-two. I suppose things get better as time goes on.”

“Well,” I said, “who knows? Some things get better, some don’t.”

“It’d be nice if we could get together and discuss things over dinner.”

“You’ll have to excuse me, but I’ve got to stay here and wait for a call.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Sorry about everything.”

“Anyway, thanks for calling.”

I hung up.

Clever, very clever. A call girl, maybe, looking for some business. True, she might really have been just a lonely girl. Either way it was the same. I still had zero leads.

The following day there was only one call, from a mentally disturbed man. “A rat you say? Leave it to me.” He talked for fifteen minutes about fending off rats in a Siberian camp. An interesting tale, but no lead.

While waiting for the telephone to ring, I sat in the half-sprung chair by the window and spent the day watching the work conditions on the third floor office across the street. Stare as I might all day long, I couldn’t figure out what the company did. The company had ten employees, and people were constantly running in and out like in a basketball game. Someone would hand someone papers, someone would stamp these, then another someone would stuff them into an envelope and rush out the door. During the lunch break, a big-breasted secretary poured tea for everyone. In the afternoon, several people had coffee delivered. Which made me want to drink some too, so I asked the desk clerk to take messages while I went out to a coffee shop. I bought two bottles of beer on the way back. When I resumed my seat at the window, there were only four people left in the office. The big-breasted secretary was joking with a junior employee. I drank a beer and watched the office activities, but mainly her.

The more I looked at her breasts, the more unusually large they seemed. She must have been strapped into a brassiere with cables from the Golden Gate Bridge. Several of the junior staff seemed to have designs on her. Their sex drive came across two panes of glass and the street in between. It’s a funny thing sensing someone else’s sex drive. After a while, you get to mistaking it for your own.

At five o’clock, she changed into a red dress and went home. I closed the curtain and watched a Bugs Bunny rerun on television. So went the eighth day at the Dolphin Hotel.

“Just great,” said I. This “just great” business was becoming a habit. “One-third of the month gone and we still haven’t gotten anywhere.”

“So it would seem,” said she. “I wonder how Kipper’s getting on?”

After supper, we rested on the vile orange sofa in the Dolphin Hotel lobby. No one else around except our three-fingered clerk. He was keeping busy, up on a ladder changing a light bulb, cleaning the windows, folding newspapers. There may have been other guests in the place; perhaps they were all in their rooms like mummies kept out of the light of day.

“How’s business?” the desk clerk asked timidly as he watered the potted plants.

“Nothing much to speak of,” I said.

“Seems you placed an ad in the papers.”

“That I did,” I said. “I’m trying to track down this one person on some land inheritance.”

“Inheritance?”

“Yes. Trouble is the inheritor’s disappeared, whereabouts unknown.”

“Do tell. Sounds like interesting work.”

“Not really.”

“I don’t know, there’s something of Moby Dick about it.”

“Moby Dick?”

“Sure. The thrill of hunting something down.”

“A mammoth, for example?” said my girlfriend.

“Sure. It’s all related,” said the clerk. “Actually, I named this place the Dolphin Hotel because of a scene with dolphins in Moby Dick.”

“Oh-ho,” said I. “But if that’s the case, wouldn’t it have been better to name it the Whale Hotel?”

“Whales don’t have quite the image,” he admitted with some regret.

“The Dolphin Hotel’s a lovely name,” said my girlfriend.

“Thank you very much,” smiled the clerk. “Incidentally, having you here for this extended stay strikes me as most auspicious, and I’d like to offer you some wine as a token of my thanks.”

“Delighted,” she said.

“Much obliged,” I said.

He went into a back room and emerged after a moment with a chilled bottle of white wine and three glasses.

“A toast. I’m still on the job, so just a sip for me.”

We drank our wine. Not a particularly fine wine, but a light, dry, pleasant sort of wine. Even the glasses were swell.

“You a Moby Dick fan?” I thought to ask.

“You could say that. I always wanted to go to sea ever since I was a child.”

“And that’s why you’re in the hotel business today?” she asked.

“That’s why I’m missing fingers,” he said. “Actually, they got mangled in a winch unloading cargo from a freighter.”

“How horrible!” she exclaimed.

“Everything went black at the time. But life’s a fickle thing. Somehow or other, I ended up owning this hotel here. Not much of a hotel, but I’ve done all right by it. Ten years I’ve had it.”

Which would mean he wasn’t the desk clerk, but the owner.

“I couldn’t imagine a finer hotel,” she encouraged.

“Thank you very much,” said the owner, refilling our wineglasses.

“For only ten years, the building has taken on quite a lot of, well, character,” I ventured forth unabashedly.

“Yes, it was built right after the war. I count myself most fortunate that I could buy it so cheaply.”

“What was it used for before it was a hotel?”

“It went by the name of the Hokkaido Ovine Hall. Housed all sorts of papers and resources concerning …”

“Ovine?” I said.

“Sheep,” he said.

“The building was the property of the Hokkaido Ovine Association, that is, up until ten years ago. What with the decline in sheep raising in the territory, the Hall was closed,” he said, sipping his wine. “Actually, the acting director at the time was my own father. He couldn’t abide the thought of his beloved Ovine Hall shutting down, and so on the pretext of preserving the sheep resources he talked the Association into selling him the land and the building at a good price. Hence, to this day the whole second floor of the building is a sheep reference room. Of course, being resource materials, most of the stuff is old and useless. The dotings of an old man. The rest of the place is mine for the hotel business.”

“Some coincidence,” I said.

“Coincidence?”

“If the truth be known, the person we’re looking for has something to do with sheep. And the only lead we’ve got is this one photograph of sheep that he sent.”

“You don’t say,” he said. “I’d like to have a look at it if I might.”

I pulled out the sheep photo that I’d sandwiched between the pages of my notebook and handed it to him. He picked up his glasses from the counter and studied the photo.

“I do seem to have some recollection of this,” he said.

“A recollection?”

“For certain.” So saying, he took the ladder from where he’d left it under the light and leaned it up against the opposite wall. He brought down a framed picture. Then he wiped off the dust and handed the picture to us.

“Is this not the same scenery?”

The frame itself was plenty old, but the photo in it was even older, discolored too. And yes, there were sheep in it. Altogether maybe sixty head. Fence, birch grove, mountains. The birch grove was different in shape from the one in the Rat’s photograph, but the mountains in the background were the same mountains. Even the composition of the photograph was the same.

“Just great,” I said to her. “All this time we’ve been passing right under this photograph.”

“That’s why I told you it had to be the Dolphin Hotel,” she blurted out.

“Well then,” I asked the man, “exactly where is this place?”

“Don’t rightly know,” he said. “The photograph’s been hanging in that spot since Ovine Hall days.”

“Hmph,” I grunted.

“But there’s a way to find out.”

“Like what?”

“Ask my father. He’s got a room upstairs where he spends his days. He hardly ever comes out, he’s so wrapped up in his sheep materials. I haven’t set eyes on him for half a month now. I just leave his meals in front of his door, and the tray’s empty thirty minutes later, so I know he’s alive.”

“Would your father be able to tell us where the place in the photograph is?”

“Probably. As I said before, he was the former director of Ovine Hall, and anyway he knows all there is to know about sheep. Everyone calls him the Sheep Professor.”

“The Sheep Professor,” I said.

The Sheep Professor Eats All, Tells All

According to his Dolphin Hotel–owner son, the Sheep Professor had by no means had a happy life.

“Father was born in Sendai in 1905, the eldest son of a land-holding family,” the son explained. “I’ll go by the Western calendar, if that’s all right with you.”

“As you please.”

“They weren’t independently wealthy, but they lived on their own land. An old family previously vested with a fief from the local castle lord. Even yielded a respected agriculturist toward the end of the Edo period.

“The Sheep Professor excelled in scholastics from early on, a child wonder known to everyone in Sendai. And not just schooling. He surpassed everyone at the violin and in middle school even performed a Beethoven sonata for the royal family when they came to the area, for which he was given a gold watch.

“The family tried to push him in the direction of law, but, the Sheep Professor flatly refused. ‘I have no interest in law,’ said the young Sheep Professor.

“‘Then go ahead with your music,’ said his father. ‘There ought to be at least one musician in the family.’

“‘I have no interest in music either,’ replied the Sheep Professor.

“There was a brief pause.

“‘Well then,’ his father spoke up, ‘what path is it you want to take?’

“‘I am interested in agriculture. I want to learn agricultural administration.’

“‘Very well,’ said his father a second later. What else could he say? The Sheep Professor was considerate and earnest, the sort of youth who once he said something would stick by his word. His own father couldn’t get a word in edgewise.

“The following year, as per his wishes, the Sheep Professor matriculated at the Agriculture Faculty of Tokyo Imperial University. His child-wonder love of studies showed no sign of abating even there. Everyone, including his professors, was watching him. Scholastically he excelled as always, and he enjoyed tremendous popularity. He was, in a nutshell, one of your chosen few. Untainted by dissipation, reading every spare moment. If he tired of reading, he’d play his violin in the university courtyard, his gold watch ever in the pocket of his school uniform.

“He graduated at the top of his class and entered the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry as one of the elite. His senior thesis was, simply stated, a unified scheme of large-scale agriculturalization for Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, which some decried as slightly too idealistic. It was, nonetheless, the talk of the time.

“After two years in the Ministry, the Sheep Professor went to the Korean peninsula to conduct research in rice cultivation. His report, published as A Study on Rice Cropping on the Korean Peninsula, was adopted by the government.

“In 1934, the Sheep Professor was called back to Tokyo and was introduced to a young army officer. For the big, imminent North China campaign, the Sheep Professor was asked to establish a self-sufficiency program based on sheep. This was to be the Sheep Professor’s first encounter with sheep. The Sheep Professor concentrated on developing a general framework for ovine productivity in Japan, Manchuria, and Mongolia. The following spring, he embarked on a site-observation tour.

“The spring of 1935 passed uneventfully. The events happened in July. Setting out on horseback, unaccompanied, on his observation tour, the Sheep Professor disappeared. Whereabouts unknown.

“Three days, four days passed. Still no Professor. The army search team combed the terrain desperately, but he was nowhere to be found. Perhaps he had been attacked by wolves or abducted by tribesmen. Then at dusk a week later, just as everyone had given up hope, one utterly disheveled Sheep Professor wandered back into camp. His face was haggard, with cuts in several places, but his eyes retained their gleam. His horse was gone, his watch was gone. His explanation, which everyone seemed willing to accept, was that he’d lost his way and his horse fell injured.

“Not one month later, a bizarre rumor began to spread through the government offices. Word had gotten out that he enjoyed a ‘special relationship’ with sheep. What this ‘special relationship’ meant, no one knew. Whereupon his superior summoned him to his office and conducted an interrogation to set the record straight. Rumors are not to be tolerated in colonial societies.

“‘Did you in truth experience a special relationship with sheep?’ queried his superior.

“‘I did,’ answered the Sheep Professor.

“The interrogation went something like this:

Q: By this special relationship, do you mean you engaged in sexual relations with sheep?

A: No, that is not the case.

Q: Please explain.

A: It was a mental relationship.

Q: That is not an explanation.

A: It is difficult to find the right words, sir, but perhaps spiritual communion comes close.

Q: You would tell me you had spiritual communion with sheep?

A: That is correct.

Q: Are you telling me that during the week of your disappearance you had spiritual communion with sheep?

A: That is correct.

Q: Do you not think that is sufficient reason for dismissal from your offices?

A: It is my office to study sheep, sir.

Q: Spiritual communion is not a recognized course of study. Henceforth, I would ask that you amend your ways. Consider your graduation with honors from the Agriculture Faculty of Tokyo Imperial University, your brilliant work record upon entering the Ministry. There are great expectations of you as the standard-bearer of agricultural administration for tomorrow’s East Asia.

A: I understand.

Q: Then forget about this spiritual communion nonsense. Sheep are livestock. Simply livestock.

A: It is impossible for me to forget.

Q: You will have to explain the circumstances.

A: The reason, sir, is that there is a sheep inside me.

Q: That is not an explanation.

A: Further explanation is impossible.

“February 1936. The Sheep Professor is ordered home to Japan. After undergoing numerous similar interrogations, he is transferred in the spring to the Ministry Reference Collection. There he catalogues reference materials and organizes bookshelves. In other words, he has been purged from the core elite of the East Asian agricultural administration.

“‘The sheep has now gone from inside me,’ the Sheep Professor told a close friend at the time. ‘But it used to be there inside.’

“1937. Sheep Professor retires from the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry and, availing himself of a Ministry loan under the Japan-Manchuria Sheep Scheme, which used to be in his charge, moves to Hokkaido and becomes a shepherd. 56 head of sheep.

“1939. Sheep Professor marries. 128 head of sheep.

“1942. Eldest son born (present owner-operator of the Dolphin Hotel). 181 head of sheep.

“1946. American Occupation Forces appropriate Sheep Professor’s sheep ranch as a training camp. 62 head of sheep.

“1947. Sheep Professor enters employ of Hokkaido Ovine Association.

“1949. Wife dies of bronchitis.

“1950. Sheep Professor assumes directorship of Hokkaido Ovine Association.

“1960. Eldest son loses fingers at Port of Otaru.

“1967. Hokkaido Ovine Hall closes.

“1968. Dolphin Hotel opens.

“1978. Young real estate agent inquires about sheep photograph.”

Me, in other words.

“Just great,” I said.

“By all means, I would like to meet your father,” I said.

“I have no objection to your meeting him, but since my father dislikes me, you’ll have to excuse me if I ask you to go alone,” said the son of the Sheep Professor.

“Dislikes you?”

“Because I lost two fingers and am balding.”

“I see,” I said. “An eccentric man, your father.”

“As his son, it’s not for me to say, but yes, an eccentric man indeed. A completely changed man since he encountered sheep. Extremely difficult, sometimes even cruel. Deep down in his heart he’s kind. If you heard him play his violin, you’d know that. Sheep hurt my father, and through my father, sheep have also hurt me.”

“You love your father, don’t you?” said my girlfriend.

“Yes, that I do. I love him very much,” said the Dolphin Hotel owner, “but he dislikes me. He never once held me since the day I was born. Never once had a kind word for me. And since I lost my fingers and started going bald, he’s done nothing but ridicule me.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t mean to ridicule you,” she said.

“I can’t believe that he would either,” I said.

“You’re too kind,” said the hotel man.

“Shall we go and try to see him directly, then?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said the hotel man. “Though I’m sure he’ll see you if you’re careful about two things. One is to state clearly that you wish to inquire about sheep.”

“And the other?”

“Don’t say that I told you about him.”

“Fair enough,” I said.

We thanked the Sheep Professor’s son and headed up the stairs. The air at the top of the stairs was chilly and damp. The lights were dim, scarcely revealing the dust drifts in the corners of the hallway. The whole place smelled indistinctly of old papers and old body odors. We walked down the long hallway, as per the son’s instructions, and knocked on the ancient door at the end. An old plastic plaque affixed to the door read DIRECTOR’S OFFICE. No answer. I knocked again. Again, no answer. At the third knock, there was a groan, and then the response—“Don’t bother me. Go away.”

“We’ve come to ask a few things about sheep, if we might.”

“Eat shit!” yelled the Sheep Professor from inside. A mighty healthy voice for seventy-three.

“We really have to talk with you,” I shouted through the door.

“Don’t give me this you-want-to-talk-about-sheep crap,” said the Sheep Professor.

“But it’s something that probably ought to be discussed,” I coaxed. “It’s about a sheep that disappeared in 1936.”

There was a brief silence, then the door flew open. Before us stood the Sheep Professor.

The Sheep Professor had long hair, white as snow. His eyebrows were also white, hanging down over his eyes like icicles. He stood five foot ten. A self-possessed figure. Sturdy-boned. His nose thrust out from his face at a challenging angle, like a ski jump.

His body odor permeated the entire room. No, I would hesitate to call it body odor. Beyond a certain point, it ceased to be body odor and blended into time, merged with the light. What had probably once been a large space was so packed with old books and papers you could hardly see the floor. Almost all the publications were scholarly tomes written in foreign languages. Without exception, all were covered with stains. On the right, against the wall, was a filthy bed, and before the window a huge mahogany desk and revolving chair. The desktop was in relative order, papers neatly stacked and surmounted by a paperweight in the shape of a sheep. The room was dark, the only illumination coming from a dust-covered lamp’s sixty-watt bulb.

The Sheep Professor was wearing a gray shirt, black cardigan, and herringbone trousers that had all but lost their shape. In the light of the room, his gray shirt and black cardigan could have passed for a white shirt and gray cardigan. Maybe those had been the original colors, hard to say.

The Sheep Professor sat behind his desk, motioning with his finger for us to sit down on the bed. We made our way over, straddling books as if crossing a minefield, and sat down. The bed was so palpably grimy I was afraid my Levi’s would stick to the sheets. The Sheep Professor folded his fingers on top of his desk and stared at us intently. His fingers were thick with black hair right up to his knuckles. The blackness in stark contrast to the brilliant white of his head.

Suddenly, the Sheep Professor picked up the telephone and shouted into the receiver: “Bring me my supper, quick!”

“Well now,” said the Professor. “You say you have come to discuss a sheep that disappeared in 1936?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“Hmm,” he said. Then abruptly, with great volume, he blew his nose into a wad of paper. “Is there something you wish to tell? Or something you wish to ask?”

“Both.”

“First, let me hear what you have to tell.”

“We know what became of the sheep that escaped you in the spring of 1936.”

The Sheep Professor snorted. “Are you telling me that you know I threw away everything I had for a sheep I have been trying to track down for forty-two years?”

“We are aware of that,” I said.

“You could be making this up.”

I pulled out the silver lighter from my pocket and placed it on his desk together with the Rat’s sheep photograph. He reached out a hairy hand, picked up the lighter and photograph, and examined them at length under the lamp. Particles of silence floated about the room for the longest time. The solid double-hung window shut out the city noise; only the sputter of the old lamp punctuated the silence.

The old man, having finished his examination of the lighter and photograph, turned off the lamp with a click and rubbed his eyes with stubby fingers. As if he were trying to press his eyeballs into his skull. When he removed his fingers, his eyes were murky red, like a rabbit’s.

“Forgive me,” said the Sheep Professor. “I’ve been surrounded by idiots for so long, I’ve grown distrustful of people.”

“That’s okay,” I said.

My girlfriend smiled politely.

“Can you imagine what it’s like to be left with a solitary thought when its embodiment has been pulled out from underneath you, roots and all?” asked the Professor.

“No, I can’t.”

“It’s hell. A maze of a subterranean hell. Unmitigated by even one shaft of light or a single draft of water. That’s been my life for forty-two years.”

“Because of this sheep?”

“Yes, yes, yes. All because of that sheep. That sheep left me stranded in the thick of everything. In the spring of 1936.”

“And it was to search for this sheep that you left the Ministry of Agriculture, am I correct?”

“Those paper pushers were all morons. They hadn’t the slightest idea of the true value of things. Probably’ll never catch on to the monumental significance of that sheep.”

There came a knock on the door, followed by a woman’s voice. “I’ve brought you your meal.”

“Leave it,” said the Sheep Professor.

The sound of the tray being set on the floor was followed by the echo of receding footsteps.

My girlfriend opened the door and brought the meal tray over to the Sheep Professor’s desk. On the tray were soup, salad, a roll, and meatballs for the Professor, plus two coffees for us.

“You’ve eaten already?” asked the Sheep Professor.

“Yes, thank you,” I said.

“What did you have?”

“Veal in wine sauce,” I said.

“Shrimp, grilled,” she said.

The Sheep Professor grunted. Then he ate his soup and crunched the croutons. “Excuse me if I eat while you talk. I’m hungry.”

“By all means,” we said.

The Sheep Professor ate his soup and we sipped our coffee. As he ate, the Professor stared headlong into his bowl.

“Would you know where the place in this photograph is?” I asked.

“I would indeed. I know it very well.”

“Would you tell us?”

“Just hold on,” said the Sheep Professor, setting aside his now-empty bowl. “One thing at a time. Let’s start with the events of 1936. First I’ll talk, then you talk.”

I nodded.

The Sheep Professor began. “It was the summer of 1935 when the sheep entered me. I had lost my way during a survey of open-pasture grazing near the Manchuria-Mongolia border, when I happened across a cave. I decided to spend the night there. That night I dreamed about a sheep that asked, could it go inside me? Why not? I said. At the time, I didn’t think much of it. It was a dream, after all.” The old man chortled as he moved on to his salad.

“It was a breed of sheep I’d never set eyes on before. Because of my work I was acquainted with every breed of sheep in the world, but this one was unique. The horns were bent at a strange angle, the legs squat and stocky, eyes clear as spring water. The fleece was pure white, except for a brownish star on its back. There is no such sheep anywhere in the world. That’s why I told the sheep it was all right to enter my body. As a sheep specialist, I was not about to let go of such a find.”

“And what did it feel like to have this sheep inside your body?”

“Nothing special, really. It just felt like there was this sheep inside me. I felt it in the morning. I woke up and there was this sheep inside. A perfectly natural feeling.”

“Do you experience headaches?”

“Never once since the day I was born.”

The Sheep Professor went at his meatballs, glazing them in sauce before shoveling them into his mouth with gusto. “In parts of Northern China and Mongol territory, it’s not uncommon to hear of sheep entering people’s bodies. Among the locals, it’s believed that a sheep entering the body is a blessing from the gods. For instance, in one book published in the Yuan dynasty it’s written that a ‘star-bearing white sheep’ entered the body of Genghis Khan. Interesting, don’t you think?”

“Quite.”

“The sheep that enters a body is thought to be immortal. And so too the person who hosts the sheep is thought to become immortal. However, should the sheep escape, the immortality goes. It’s all up to the sheep. If the sheep likes its host, it’ll stay for decades. If not—zip!—it’s gone. People abandoned by sheep are called the ‘sheepless.’ In other words, people like me.”

Chomp, chomp.

“Ever since that sheep entered my body, I began reading on ethnological studies and folklore related to sheep. I went around interviewing locals and checking old writings. Pretty soon talk went around that I’d been entered by a sheep, and word got back to my commanding officer. My commanding officer didn’t take kindly to it. I was labeled ‘mentally unfit’ and promptly shipped home to Japan. Your typical ‘colony case.’”

Having polished off three meatballs, the Sheep Professor moved on to the roll.

“The basic stupidity of modern Japan is that we’ve learned absolutely nothing from our contact with other Asian peoples. The same goes for our dealings with sheep. Sheep raising in Japan has failed precisely because we’ve viewed sheep merely as a source of wool and meat. The daily-life level is missing from our thinking. We minimize the time factor to maximize the results. It’s like that with everything. In other words, we don’t have our feet on solid ground. It’s not without reason that we lost the war.”

“That sheep came with you to Japan, I take it,” I said, returning to the subject.

“Yes,” said the Sheep Professor. “I returned by ship from Pusan. The sheep came with me.”

“And what on earth do you suppose the sheep’s purpose was?”

“I don’t know,” the Sheep Professor spat out. “The sheep didn’t tell me anything. But the beast did have one major purpose. That much I do know. A monumental plan to transform humanity and the human world.”

“One sheep planned to do all that?”

The Sheep Professor nodded as he popped the last morsel of his roll into his mouth and brushed the crumbs from his hands. “Nothing so alarming. Consider Genghis Khan.”

“You have a point,” I said. “But why now? Why Japan?”

“My guess is that I woke the sheep up. It probably would’ve gone on sleeping in that cave for hundreds of years. And stupid me, I had to go and wake it up.”

“It’s not your fault,” I said.

“No,” said the Professor, “it is my fault. I should have caught on a long time ago. I would have had a hand to play. But it took me a long time to catch on. And by the time I did, the sheep had already run off.”

The Sheep Professor grew silent. He rubbed his icicled white brow with his fingers. It was as if the weight of forty-two years had infiltrated the furthest reaches of his body.

“One morning I awoke and the sheep was gone. It was then that I understood what it meant to be ‘sheepless.’ Sheer hell. The sheep goes away leaving only an idea. But without the sheep there is no expelling that idea. That is what it is to be ‘sheepless.’”

Again the Sheep Professor blew his nose on a wad of paper. “Now it’s your turn to talk.”

I began with the route the sheep took after it left the Sheep Professor. How the sheep had entered the body of a rightist youth in prison. How as soon as this youth got out of prison he became a major right-wing figure. How he then crossed over to the Chinese continent and built up an intelligence network and a fortune in the process. How he’d been marked a Class A war criminal, but how he was released in exchange for his intelligence network on the continent. And how, utilizing the fortune he brought back from China, he’d laid claim to the whole underside of postwar politics, economics, information, etc., etc.

“I’ve heard of this man,” the Sheep Professor said bitterly. “Somehow the sheep has an uncanny sense of the most competent targets.”

“Only this spring, the sheep left his body. The man himself is in a coma, on the verge of death. Up until now, it seems that a brain dysfunction covered for the sheep.”

“Such bliss. Better that the ‘sheepless’ be without this shell of half-consciousness.”

“Why do you suppose the sheep left his body—after all this time building up a huge organization?”

The Sheep Professor let out a deep sigh. “You still don’t understand? It’s the same with that man as it was with me. He outlived his usefulness. People have their limits, and the sheep has no use for people who’ve reached their limit. My guess is that he did not fully comprehend all that the sheep had cut out for him. His role was to build a huge organization, and once that was complete, he was tossed. Just as the sheep used me as a means of transport.”

“So what has the sheep been up to since?”

The Sheep Professor picked up the photograph from the desk and gave it a flick of his fingers. “It has roamed all over Japan to search out a new host. To the sheep, that would probably mean a new person to put on top of the organization by one scheme or another.”

“And what is the sheep seeking?”

“As I said before, I can’t express that in words with any precision. What the sheep seeks is the embodiment of sheep thought.”

“Is that good?”

“To the sheep’s thinking, of course it’s good.”

“And to yours?”

“I don’t know,” said the old man. “I really don’t know. Ever since the sheep departed, I can’t tell how much is really me and how much the shadow of the sheep.”

“A while ago, you said something about having a hand to play. What would that be?”

“I have no intention of telling you that.” The Sheep Professor shook his head.

Once again, silence shrouded the room. Outside, a hard rain began to fall. The first rain since we’d arrived in Sapporo.

“One last thing: could you tell us where the place in the photograph is?” I asked.

“The homestead where I lived for nine years. I raised sheep there. Appropriated right after the war by the American Forces, and when they repatriated the place to me I sold it to some rich man as a vacation home with pasture. Ought to still be the same owner.”

“And would he still be raising sheep?”

“I don’t know. But from the photograph it sure looks as if he’s raising sheep. Whatever, it’s a good remove from any settlements. Not another house in sight. The roads are blocked in the winter. I’m sure the owner uses the place only two, maybe three months a year. It’s nice and quiet there.”

“Does anyone look after the place when the owner’s not there?”

“I doubt if anyone stays there over the winter. Other than myself, I can’t imagine any other human staying there the winter through. You can pay the municipal shepherds in the town at the foot of the hills to look after the sheep. The roof of the house is sloped so that the snow naturally slides off onto the ground, and no worry about burglars. Even if somebody did steal something up there, it’d be a pain to get it to town. It’s staggering, the amount of snow that falls there.”

“So is anyone there now?”

“Hmm. Maybe not now. The snow’s going to start soon and bears’ll be roaming around for food before they go into hibernation. You’re not planning to head up there?”

“Probably will have to. We have no other real lead.”

The Sheep Professor sat for a while with his mouth shut. Tomato sauce from the meatballs at the corner of his mouth.

“You should probably know that prior to you one other person came here asking about the homestead. Around February it was. Age and appearance, well, kind of like you. He said he was interested in the photograph in the hotel lobby. I was pretty bored at the time, so I told him this and that. He said he was looking for material for a novel he was writing.”

Out of my pocket I pulled a snapshot of the Rat and me together. It was taken in the summer eight years before, in J’s Bar. I was in profile, smoking a cigarette, the Rat was looking at the camera, signaling thumbs up. Both of us were young and tan.

“This one’s you, eh?” said the Sheep Professor, holding the snapshot under the lamp. “Younger than now.”

“You’re right—taken eight years ago.”

“The other one’s that man. He looked older than in this photo and had a moustache, but it was him.”

“A moustache?”

“A neat little moustache and the rest stubble.”

I tried to picture the Rat with a moustache, but couldn’t quite see it.

The Sheep Professor drew us a detailed map to the homestead. You had to change trains near Asahikawa to a branch line and travel three hours to get to the town at the foot of the hills. From there it was three hours by car to the homestead.

“Thank you kindly for everything,” I said.

“If you really want to know the truth, I think the fewer people that get involved with that sheep the better. I’m a prime example. There’s not a soul the happier for having tangled with it. The values of one lone individual cannot bear up before the presence of that sheep. But well, I guess you’ve got your reasons.”

“That I do.”

“Be careful now,” said the Sheep Professor. “And place the dishes by the door if you would.”

Farewell to the Dolphin Hotel

We took one day to ready for our departure.

We got mountaineering supplies and portable rations at a sporting-goods store, and bought heavy fishermen’s knit sweaters and woolen socks at a department store. At a bookstore, we bought a 1:50,000-scale map of the area we were headed for and a tome on the local history. We also settled on some rugged spiked boots and padded thermal underwear.

“All these layers do absolutely nothing for my line of work,” she said.

“When you’re out in the snow, you won’t have time to think about that,” I said.

“You planning to stay until the heavy snows?”

“Can’t tell. But I do know it’ll already be starting by the end of October. Better to be prepared. No telling what to expect.”

We hauled our purchases back to the hotel and stuffed them into a large backpack, then we gathered together all the extra items we’d brought from Tokyo and left them with the Dolphin Hotel man. As a matter of fact, almost everything she’d brought in her bag was extra. A cosmetics set, five books and six cassettes, one paper bag full of stockings and underwear, T-shirts and shorts, a travel alarm clock, a sketchbook and set of twenty-four colored pencils, stationery and envelopes, bath towel, mini first-aid kit, hair dryer, cotton swabs.

“But why are you bringing your dress and high-heels with us?”

“What am I supposed to do if we go to a party?” she pleaded.

“What makes you think there’s going to be a party?”

There was no reasoning with her. She managed to fit her dress, neatly folded, and high heels into our backpack along with our pared-down effects. For cosmetics, she switched to a travel compact she picked up at a nearby shop.

The hotel owner accepted the luggage graciously. I settled the bill up through the following day and told him we’d be back in a week or two.

“Was my father of any help?” he asked worriedly.

I said that he’d helped enormously.

“I sometimes wish I could go off in search of something,” he declared, “but before getting even that far, I myself wouldn’t have the slightest idea what to search for. Now my father, he’s someone who’s been searching for something all his life. He’s still searching today. Ever since I was a little boy, my father’s told me about the white sheep that came to him in his dreams. So I always thought that’s what life is like. An ongoing search.”

The lobby of the Dolphin Hotel was hushed as ever. An elderly maid was going up and down the stairs with a mop.

“My father’s seventy-three now and still no sheep. I don’t know if the thing even exists. I can’t help thinking that it hasn’t been such a good life for him. I want to see my father happy now more than ever, but he just belittles me and won’t listen to a word I say. That’s because I have no purpose in life.”

“But you have the Dolphin Hotel,” my girlfriend said sweetly.

“Besides, your father’s stepped down from his sheep searching,” I added. “We’ve taken up the rest.”

The hotel owner smiled.

“If that’s so, there’s nothing more for me to say. We two ought to get on very happily.”

“I sure hope so,” I said.

Later, when we were alone, she asked me, “Do you really think those two deserve each other?”

“They’ve been together this long … They’ll be all right. At least, after a forty-two-year gap, the Sheep Professor’s role is finished. Now we have to track down the sheep.”

“I like those two.”

“I like them too.”

We finished our packing and had intercourse, then went out and saw a movie. In the movie there were a lot of men and women having intercourse too. Nothing wrong with watching others having intercourse, after all.