A Wild Sheep Chase

It's hard not to reach the end of Haruki Murakami's wonderfully entertaining A WILD SHEEP CHASE and not find yourself asking, "What was THAT all about?" Sometimes hilarious, sometimes sad with loss, almost always quirky after the style of Kurt Vonnegut, Murakami's story line pulls you in and keeps you hooked with unexpected twists and turns that leave you as desperate as his nameless main character to learn the ovine truth. On its face, the book is a combination mystery story, grail quest, and science fiction novel, laced with biting sarcasm. A perfectly regular young advertising executive is approached one day by a mysterious stranger concerning a photograph of sheep grazing in a mountain pasture that the agency used in an insurance company ad. Buried within the herd is one sheep of an unknown breed with a star-shaped birthmark on its back. Unbeknown to the young executive, he has transgressed some unmarked boundary and caught the attention of The Boss, an immensely rich Tokyo businessman and power broker. The mysterious stranger delivers an ultimatum from The Boss: find the sheep in one month and be exceedingly well-rewarded, or be forced into permanent career ruin if he fails. The balance of the book traces the quest of the young executive and his unusual girlfriend to find the sheep and discover its bizarre significance. With A WILD SHEEP CHASE, Murakami has constructed a bizarre novel populated by an alcoholic business partner, a godlike mysterious stranger dressed in black, a girlfriend with uncanny sixth sense and ears that turn her into an irresistible beauty when exposed, a philosophizing chauffeur, a borderline psychotic Sheep Professor, and a man who lives in the woods and dresses like a sheep. All of the characters are nameless, at most given nicknames like The Boss, The Rat, J, and Sheep Man. Only the hero's aged and unnamed cat is bestowed with a name, Kipper, in the course of the story. Fabulous imagery and clever prose riffs abound in Murakami's world. Consider the following small sampling: -- "Far off, someone was practicing piano. It sounded like tripping down an up escalator." -- "The elevator shook like a large dog with lung disease." -- "Occasionally, someone coughed with a dry rasp that sounded like a mummy tapped on the head with a pair of tongs." -- "The yellow glow of the light bulbs drifted about the room like pollen." -- "The house kept its own time, like the old-fashioned grandfather clock in the living room. People who happened by raised the weights, and as long as the weights were wound, the clock continued ticking away. But with people gone and the weights unattended, whole chunks of time were left to collect in deposits of faded life on the floor." So what is the book really all about? Perhaps it's a commentary about economic and emotional gain and loss in our lives, or maybe it's a parable about the existence of free will and how much more difficult it is to exercise than we think (and how less often we reall

...and I use the term freak in the most reverent of ways. I also use it to describe the author; because while the main character is a freak in his own right, he's one of an entirely different caliber. A Wild Sheep Chase takes us to Tokyo Japan 'round 1980 and dumps us into the sharp but entirely unexercised, and increasingly apathetic mind of our 30 year old (male) main character. Funny, I just checked the book because I couldn't remember his name. I couldn't find it. I may be wrong, but I don't know if the author gives him one. Anyway... Newly divorced, incessantly smoking, and always musing in very interesting ways about largely uninteresting things, I found myself pulled into this novel immediately. "We" soon find ourselves embroiled in an epic and supernatural mystery with only a half-tank of gas. When tasked by an uber-powerful businessman to find a certain certain one-of-a-kind sheep or face financial ruin (if not death), our adventurer shruggingly agrees, and half-heartedly pursues. The slurring pace of this book, filled with philosophical musings, "David Lynch like" weirdos, and a spattering of phenomenon, was a rare treat for me. Murakami is a wonderfully gifted creative writer. His prose (even though translated) is at once elegantly crafted and playful. I recommend this book highly. Christian Hunter Santa Barbara, California

"A Wild Sheep Chase" is a wonderful and colorful read. Ostensibly the story of a nameless and flat protagonist as he searches for the answer to a puzzling riddle, the story sees to wander greatly in the first two-thirds of the book. The lead character, coerced into searching for a missing and mysterious sheep, never seems to sense the urgency of what his failure could mean. He is a character who feels he has nothing to lose. Indeed, his only redeeming characteristics seem to be that he cares for a missing friend (called "The Rat") and that he has enough curiosity to even push him towards an attempt at solving the riddle. While the protagonist is very much an empty vessel, the reader of this book will find themselves attracted to the detached yet interesting interactions with some of the other main characters. The characters and scenes, for the most part, are David Lynch-like; quirky, with murky motives, and strange communications.Structurally, the book wanders around a bit while getting started. It feels as if the author just started writing one day and learned how to tie it all together as he went along (near the end of the book). Even so, while it may feel that not much plot progress is being made, however, Murakami is able to delight the reader enough with his inventiveness that the story seems worthwhile. The book climaxes with a brilliant metaphyical dialogue between the protagonist and his friend. The last several chapters are done so well, I had to read them a couple of times and scribble all over the pages (that's surely a good sign).I found Murakami to have a concise and enjoyable writing style that is deceptively simple for the deeply layered plot it conveyed. I certainly wil be recommending the book to my friends.

The genius of Murakami's "Wild Sheep Chase" (like the genius of his other works) is the total believability of his characters and plot. Everyone who reads this work is immediately engrossed and sucked in, and only realizes how truly bizarre the whole thing is when they try to tell someone else about the book. The narrator of "Sheep Chase" begins as something of an Everyman. His mate leaves him, his job pays him well but isn't very satisfying, he is intelligent but little in his life seems to stimulate him to thought. You wouldn't say he is going through life with blinders on, but nor is his life totally examined, either. Life is, more or less, something that is just happening to him. You could probably think of a dozen people you know who would easily fit his character. Still, this is a Murakami novel, after all, and pretty soon he is, in the words of Tolkein, simply swept away, a stranger in a strange land with no idea of how he got there. A perfectly ordinary photo that he uses in a brochure catches the attention of a powerful political figure, "The Boss", who has been inexplicably lying on the verge of death for some years, hanging on as if by some supernatural power. The photo, it's discovered, has a special sheep in it. A type of sheep who's breed does not exist. A minion of The Boss makes him an offer he cannot refuse: find that sheep...He meets up with a young woman who, among other things, is a call girl for an exclusive members-only club, and does ear modeling on the side. Together, they set off to find this elusive sheep-that-doesn't-exist, all the while trailing the narrator's old friend, The Rat, who seems to always be one step ahead of them.Much has been written about Murakami and "Wild Sheep Chase", including that this work is a shining example of the postmodern novel. While this may be the case, potential readers shouldn't shy away from this book simply because they may not know a fig about postmodernism. Unlike other "postmodern novels", which are often thickets of high rhetoric and voluminous nonsense, "Wild Sheep Chase" can be read on a multitude of levels: both as lit crit and as pure, enjoyable fiction. To read it strictly as one or the other is to do a great injustice to this work.

Haruki Murakami is modern-day Japan's most popular novelist. Both a literary success and a commercial success, Murakami has been the recipient of the Noma Literary Award for New Writers (A Wild Sheep Chase) and the Tanazaki Prize (for The Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World).Murakami's fiction shares almost nothing in common with more classical Japanese authors like Kawabata, Mishima and Tanazaki, and early reviews compared his work to that of Raymond Carver, Thomas Pynchon, Raymond Chandler and Thomas Berger. Comparisons, however, are always unfair. Murakami is most definitely an original. The worlds he creates are his and his alone, and although he invites us to visit for awhile, only he can truly inhabit them.Embracing Murakami's signature themes of isolation and alienation, A Wild Sheep Chase is part detective thriller, part allegory, part fantasy, and part post-modern send-up. It is thoroughly Western in both its outlook and writing style and thoroughly original by any standard.Murakami, who is more likely to speak of the Beatles (a book he titled Norwegian Wood remains his best seller in Japan) and Heineken than of kabuki and sushi, takes us on a wild-and-woolly roller coaster ride in A Wild Sheep Chase that often modulates from deadpan minimalism to a kind of fantastic fantasy world reminiscent of magical realism wherein sheep inhabit men's souls, a woman possess ears so beguilingly beautiful that they must be perpetually covered and old friends often return as ghosts for no other reason than to share a beer and a chat.A Wild Sheep Chase features a signature Murakami protagonist: a nameless, aimless, ordinary man, just about thirty and living an equally aimless, ordinary life in an essentially nonexistent Tokyo. In other words, "Everyman." It is this talent of Murakami's to capture the everyday individual innuendo so easily and fully that endears him to the hearts and minds of both Japanese and Westerners alike. In fact, a signature Murakami protagonist could well be Charlie Brown all grown up--a seemingly ordinary man caught up in extraordinary problems and one for whom nothing ever goes right; the personification of Murphy's Law in the extreme.This particular novel's protagonist has his "sort of" life interrupted with the unexpected arrival of something as seemingly innocent, innocuous and mundane as an advertising photo of a field of sheep, sent to him by his old friend, "the Rat."When the narrator makes the mistake of printing the photo in a newsletter, he then draws the unwanted attention of a singularly sinister stranger currently in the employ of "the Boss," a powerful political and financial magnate who is now lying near death and whose extraordinary avocational abilities are somehow derived from the very same sheep pictured in the mysterious photo.Blackmailed into procuring the definitely desired sheep, the nameless narrator, along with his girlfriend (she of the covere