Free A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami

hand.
    Each row of cedars bordered on neatly mowed turf, which sloped down in banks dotted with azaleas and hydrangeas and other plants beyond my powers of identification. A flock of starlings rushed, en masse, left and right across the lawn, like the aimless migration of a sand dune.
    Stone steps led down both sides of the hill: the steps to the left descended to a Japanese garden with a stone lantern and a pond, the steps to the right opened onto a small golf course. At the edge of the golf course was a gazebo the color of rum raisin, and across from it stood a classical Greek statue in stone. Beyond was an enormous garage where a different chauffeur was hosing down a different limousine. I couldn’t tell the make, but it wasn’t a used Volkswagen.
    I folded my arms and took another look around me. An impeccable garden vista, to be sure, but oh, what a sight.
    “And where is the mailbox?” I asked impertinently. I mean somebody had to go to fetch the paper every morning and evening.
    “The mailbox is by the back gate,” said the chauffeur. A sudden revelation. Of course there had to be a back gate.
    Having concluded my viewing of the grounds, I turned straight ahead and found myself facing a massive, towering structure.
    It was—how shall I put it?—a painfully solitary building. Let me explain. Say we have a concept. It goes without saying that there will be slight exceptions to that norm. Now, over time these exceptions spread like stains until finally they form a separate concept. To which other exceptions crop up. It was that kind of building, some ancient life-form that had evolved blindly, toward who knows what end.
    In its first incarnation, it seems to have been a Meiji-era Western-style manor. A high-ceilinged portico offered entrance to a two-story cream-colored house. The windows tall and double-hung in the true old style, the paint redone time and again. The roof was, as expected, copper-shingled, and the rain gutters as solid as a Roman aqueduct. A fine house in itself, exuding a period charm.
    But then some joker of an architect came along to attach another wing of the same style and color scheme onto the right side of the original structure. The intention wasn’t bad, but the effect was unpalatable. Like serving sherbet and broccoli on the same silver platter.
    This unhappy combination stood untouched for several decades until someone added a stone tower off to one side. At the pinnacle of this tower was affixed a decorative lightning rod. A mistake. Lightning was meant to strike the building and burn it down.
    Now a walkway covered by a solemn roof linked the tower directly to yet another wing. This wing was a separate entity onceagain, though it at least carried through a unified theme. The “mutual opposition of ideologies,” shall we call it. It bespoke a certain pathos, rather like the mule who, placed between two identical buckets of fodder, dies of starvation trying to decide which to eat first.
    To the left of the original structure, no less antithetical to the multiple elements already there, sprawled a traditional one-story Japanese-style villa. With marvelous hallways planked straight out like bowling lanes, surrounded with hedges and well-trained pines.
    This triple-feature-plus-coming-attractions mélange of a house perched atop the hill was not a common sight. Had it been someone’s grand scheme constructed over many years in an effort to shake off a stupor or chase away sleep, then it was an admirable success. Needless to say, an unlikely supposition. The monstrosity stood simply for money, piles of it, to which a long line of second-rate talents, era after era, had availed themselves.
    I must have been staring at this apparition a while before I noticed the chauffeur next to me, looking at his watch. A pose he looked somehow accustomed to. He’d probably stood in that same spot with any number of persons he’d driven there. All of whom had gawked at the surroundings in exactly the