A Wild Sheep Chase: A Novel [Paperback]

Haruki Murakami (Author), Alfred Birnbaum (Translator)

Book Description

Release date: April 9, 2002

A marvelous hybrid of mythology and mystery, A Wild Sheep Chase is the extraordinary literary thriller that launched Haruki Murakami’s international reputation.

It begins simply enough: A twenty-something advertising executive receives a postcard from a friend, and casually appropriates the image for an insurance company’s advertisement. What he doesn’t realize is that included in the pastoral scene is a mutant sheep with a star on its back, and in using this photo he has unwittingly captured the attention of a man in black who offers a menacing ultimatum: find the sheep or face dire consequences. Thus begins a surreal and elaborate quest that takes our hero from the urban haunts of Tokyo to the remote and snowy mountains of northern Japan, where he confronts not only the mythological sheep, but the confines of tradition and the demons deep within himself. Quirky and utterly captivating, A Wild Sheep Chase is Murakami at his astounding best.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Immensely popular in Japan, the author's first novel to be published here is a comic combination of disparate styles: a mock-hardboiled mystery, a metaphysical speculation and an ironic first-person account of an impossible quest. The narrator is a modern Japanese yuppie: divorced, in a mildly exciting relationship and a much less exciting job as an ad copywriter, he lives unexceptionally until a photograph throws his life into chaos. The snapshot, which he uses to illustrate a newsletter, shows a field of sheep with one unique crossbreed, and the picture is special enough to have attracted the attention of both the nomadic friend who sent it to him and a right-wing Mr. Big who, moribund, wants the source found before he dies. The Boss's henchman, a sleek, scary majordomo, gives the narrator one month to track it down, and the story that ensues is a postmodern detective novel in which dreams, hallucinations and a wild imagination are more important than actual clues. With the help of a fluid, slangy translation, Murakami emerges as a wholly original talent. $30,000 ad/promo; Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternates.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

This novel, the American debut of a popular contemporary Japanese writer, will have a familiar ring to Western ears. The narrative moves adroitly through mystery, fable, pensive realism, and modernist absurdity to tell the tale--at least on the surface--of a Japanese man caught up in a puzzling quest for a somewhat mystical sheep. The spare style echoes Raymond Carver, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler, with matter-of-fact absurdities reminiscent of John Irving and, in less inspired moments, Tom Robbins. While the climax of the story is somewhat unrewarding, many readers will enjoy being pulled along by the playful and engaging style and fluid structure. Interesting as an example of current Japanese writing and as an unusually hip and irreverent look at contemporary Japanese society, this would be a nice addition to larger fiction collections.
- Mark Woodhouse, Elmira Coll., N.Y.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 353 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (April 9, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 037571894X
• ISBN-13: 978-0375718946
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.8 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (143 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #22,932 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

81 of 91 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A fun, fresh, and sexy romp through the mind of a freak... August 9, 2004

By Christian Hunter

Format:Paperback

...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

39 of 43 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars dark, disturbing, delicious! February 10, 2001

By Chess Heart VINE™ VOICE

Format:Mass Market Paperback

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.

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Another madcap inquiry into the mystery of existence...and sheep. April 14, 2007

By Mark Nadja VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

Murakami is an acquired taste, but fortunately he's very easily acquired. His novels are typically a mixed bag of comic absurdity, pathos, suspense, and philosophical speculation but written in a straight-ahead, colloquial style. *A Wild Sheep Chase* is no exception. Here a struggling adman ends up recruited by a mysterious client in black to find a sheep that has appeared in an insurance company advertisement our hero's firm has designed. The sheep in this ad is special...it takes over people's consciousness.

That's the least of what you need to know to understand what kind of novel *A Wild Sheep Chase* is. And yet for all its imaginative "wildness," the novel has a traditional, hardboiled-style first-person narrative that easily draws you into the story. In fact, I'd say that three-quarters of the pleasure of this novel comes from spending time with the likeable, hard-luck narrator. Witty but not a wisecracker, laid-back but no Joe Cool, fatalistic but not cynical, he's a guy who is thoroughly convinced of his mediocrity and okay with it. He's got the kind of applied equanimity to life's vicissitudes that you wish you had, taking things as they come, taking things as they go. He knows life is heading for loss and sadness, but he's not whining about it. If he's not the kind of guy you could ever be, than he's the kind of guy you wish you had for a friend--and that makes spending 350+ pages in his company a pleasurable experience. And that's a good thing because if I had one criticism about *A Wild Sheep Chase* it's that it's about 70 pages too long. In the last third of the novel, there's a lot of description of the narrator sitting around waiting for the climax to occur when it could have occurred pages and pages beforehand. Well, as I said, he's pleasant enough company so it wasn't intolerable. Still...I got a little tired of hearing what he cooked for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, how long he slept, what things he saw upon looking out the window.

And, as for the climax...well, don't expect the usual resolution in a Murakami novel. The original mystery--or what seemed to be the original mystery at the start--has a way of shifting around to become something else entirely. It's the kind of mystery where the search becomes even more important than the answer and the answer is often left open to a good deal of reader interpretation. In this instance, however, things seem even more obscure than usual and I found the resolution of the novel unnecessarily muddied. In a novel that depends a lot on chance, coincidence, and the arbitrary, the pay-off struck me as a little too much dependent on all of these. Perhaps something was lost in the translation from the Japanese, but I found the ending of *A Wild Sheep Chase* rather unsatisfying.

These caveats aside, Murakami is more than just a mystery writer. With his reality-bending plots, ambiguity, and philosophical questioning, he is a genuinely thought-provoking literary artist and a *A Wild Sheep Chase* is an ultimately intriguing, rewarding, and, perhaps most of all, fun read.