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Summary: PART TWO
Review: Meanwhile the narrator's friend who sent this infamous picture, known only as The Rat, writes cryptic letters to the narrator, leading him on another sort of chase. The Rat never tells where he is or why he is writing. He seems to want something from the narrator, but this quest for what the Rat wants is just as mysterious as the chase through Japan for a unique sheep.
The narrator is given two months to find the sheep. He decides to embark on the search, reluctantly, because it seems he has no alternatives. His new girlfriend, who is entirely unremarkable save for her stunning ears, accompanies him and, interestingly, often predicts the turns their path will take in her dreams. The two-month deadline in curtailed as the Boss takes a turn for the worse; they want to locate the sheep before the Boss dies.
The narrator and his girlfriend travel to Hokkaido, where all clues point to the sheep being. The girlfriend has a feeling that they should stay at a place called The Dolphin Hotel. The narrator hates it there, but later they discover that the building used to be the Hokkaido Ovine Hall. SHEEP AT LAST! It also turns out that the father of the hotel's owner lives there and maintains the Sheep Reference Room on the 2nd floor of the hotel. The father is known as The Sheep Professor. The narrator and his girlfriend talk to the man and discover that the Sheep Professor indeed had been inhabited by the very same sheep they were chasing. He was a changed man after his encounter. "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?" The Sheep Professor goes on, "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." Apparently, before the sheep embodied the Sheep Professor, no sheep of this kind had existed in Japan. The Sheep Professor had been a soldier in China, and that is when the sheep jumped into his body.
The hotel owner sympathised with the narrator and his girlfriend and their quest for the sheep, but he had his own problems. He had never been able to get close to his father at all, and he blamed the sheep, "Sheep hurt my father, and through my father, sheep have also hurt me."
The narrator continues to search for the sheep but the search leads him closer and closer to where he believes his old friend Rat is staying. The narrator and girlfriend head to a villa up in the mountains where, it turns out, Rat must have been and might still be. Once there, the narrator begins to have encounters with a Sheep Man who gives him cryptic warnings. The girlfriend disappears mysteriously in the middle of the night and the Sheep Man tells the narrator he will never see her again. Eventually reality and fantasy mix, until it is not clear anymore (to the reader or to the narrator) what is quite real and what isn't. The narrator begins to realise that everything happening at the villa is like a "grotesque comedy of mishaps".
As it turns out, the sheep with the cream-coloured star on its back had inhabited Rat, and he was the one orchestrating the whole affair of the narrator having to seek him out. The Rat is interacting with the narrator, but the Rat is basically already dead. The Rat recognised the destructive power of the sheep and had been driven crazy and decided to make sure the sheep could never escape again and hanged himself. The book ends in a surreal haze. Nevertheless, an entertaining haze.
Sheep Chase is not Murakami's best work, but it is fascinating and highly detailed and unusual.
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Summary: MAYBE IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO LIVE OUT A LIFE IN CONTEXT.
Review: Wild Sheep Chase is just like it sounds in the title. It is a comedic meandering through the life of an aimless, newly divorced man with a penchant for the female ear. He works in an ad and translating agency. Actually, he suffers from indifference, lethargy and displays no ambition. He is approached by a mysterious man, asking him to seek out a specific sheep of a breed unknown to Japan. The sheep is distinctive for a cream coloured star located on its back. The mysterious man tells the narrator that this sheep once inhabited his boss (as well as various other individuals) and had ruined their lives when the sheep chose to leave these unwilling, unwitting hosts. The man's boss was once a powerful and important man, but now barely clung to survival, with a cyst in his brain and unbearable hallucinations (80% of them haunted by sheep). At first, the narrator is confused: why him? First of all, he viewed himself so mediocre that he was not qualified for a mission of this magnitude and impossibility. ('Age certainly hasn't conferred any smarts on me. Character maybe, but mediocrity is a constant, as one Russian writer put it. Russians have a way with aphorisms. They probably spend all winter thinking them up.') The narrator argues that because he has nothing to lose, the man and his boss cannot threaten him. The man counters that every man has something to lose, but they only realise it when it is gone. It becomes clear also that the narrator has published a photo of this particular sheep (without knowing it). The narrator's friend had sent him the picture and had asked him to distribute the picture as far and as wide as possible, to be seen by as many eyes as possible.
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Summary: Brilliant journey through a strange and wonderful route
Review: Excellent book by the wonderful Mr Murakami. I've read his "I" series backwards and have finally established a chronology.
Though I haven't read "Hear the wind sing", I believe the series starts with that, followed by "Pinball 1973", then "A Wild Sheep Chase" and ending with "Dance Dance Dance". The main character is the nameless "I" who experiences a personal journey of sorts while trying hard to locate an inner touchstone within himself. A Wild Sheep Chase embroils the reader in mad cap chase for the elusive and mystical sheep who inhabits the body of "shells" in order to achieve world domination. How is the hero implicated in all this? If you don't want the story spoilt, stop reading this review now. If you care, read on ... His friend, the Rat, is the last person whom the sheep enters. In order to stop the sheep at all cost from running his life, and later, the world, he kills himself while the sheep is asleep within him. Why does he do it? Because he is too attached to his personal, "weak" human traits, like the smell of of summer, the sound of the sea ... blah, blah, blah ...
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Summary: Want to gasp out loud?
Review: It's been a while since a novel blew my hair back... I'd missed that feeling of putting down a book to take it all in, and then hurriedly bring it back to my eyes to immerse myself once again. "A Wild Sheep Chase" is one of these gifts, a wonderfully mystic and fantastical tale set in a time and place nearly all of us can relate to, the modern city. It's true what they say, Murakami speaks to his readers across the continents, his Japan is about as far away from kimono's and tea ceremonies as Texas. We see ourselves and our families in these stories, and we all marvel at how we, and the characters, all adapt to bizarre situations as though they were simply meant to be. If you ever wondered how a thriller, a mystic tale focussing on sheep could possibly work, then read this and be happily surprised, and greatly rewarded.
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Summary: beautiful
Review: A story that starts off in a familiar way - The main character - a man who seems average to us - has a job and a house, a cat, he just split with his wife, he isn't happy, but he isn't really unhappy either really. The most un-Japanese of characters, a stranger in his world, but still an Everyman. Changes in his life come when he is contacted by the agent of a mysterious but powerful man about a strange matter: Some time ago he published a picture of a field of sheep, seemingly ordinary. Hidden in this picture was a sheep, one with a cream star on its back, which was far from ordinary. A sheep utterly unknown by the world. Our nameless main character is ordered to find the sheep, put under threats to his job and material life. With his girlfriend, a woman whose ears possesses the power of zen satori (momentary enlightenment), he embarks on a journey across Japan and through the levels of his consciousness. The goal he approaches becomes more personal than physical, and what he finds in the end is not at all what he was looking for in the beginning. Along his search for the sheep he meets people who have encountered the sheep in their lives. The sheep has profoundly changed the life of everyone it has touched. When the sheep is in a person (for that is what it does, it takes control of people; using them to its own sheepish ends,) they can do no wrong. They experience leaps and bounds in every aspect of their lives and unbelievable satisfaction, happiness and success. When the sheep leaves them, they are destroyed. They spend the remainder of their often short lives searching desperately for the sheep, trying to re-gain the perfection their lives had during its presence, recapture their lost enlightenment. Many readers of this book believe that the sheep symbolizes zen enlightenment, as the sheep possessed characters often demonstrate these characteristics. This contrasts sharply with the author's estrangement from his own culture which can be seen by his characters' surprising Americaness, so we are left to wonder why he has based a book around an idea as Japanese as enlightenment. All characters touched by the sheep in Murakami's novel are hurt by it; he may be suggesting a different approach to life, something our modern consciousness can better reconcile with. A different way to find happiness. Perhaps zen enlightenment is too difficult and unrealistic a path for humans, with all our flaws, to pursue. Perhaps we need a path that focuses on embracing the present in the face of an uncertain future instead of demanding our faith in the unknown. A goal that Murakami expresses as unreachable save through supernatural, and possibly corrupted help (the sheep) is perhaps not the path he is recommending to the reader. Through the course of his search, the main character slowly sheds his material possessions and gains a sense of intuition which he did not have in the beginning of the book. He goes from having a very extrinsic personality to having true intrinsic understanding. This could be viewed as a progression along both/either the path of zen enlightenment or existentialism, philosophies in both of which the character embraces their life for what it is and rejects the false appearances of the world. Something Kundera would call stripping away the kitsch. The last person we meet who was touched by the sheep, the sheepman, finds the strength, (or weakness, in this case they are the same) to reject the sheep from himself. He is too weak to give up the simple pleasures of his life for the greater ideals offered him by the sheep. He is strong enough to resist its lure. Thus instead of embracing a philosophy which focuses on the pain in life and on death, he chooses to embrace his own life. He states that he was too weak to give up his life, too in love with the world to let the sheep take over. His weakness in this way becomes his strength. And he is able to attain true happiness unlike other sheeped characters. Perhaps the only strength of humankind in general is our weakness, and we do not have the moral fiber it takes to pursue the sheep. Even the title, "A Wild Sheep Chase" implies that the sheep is something which cannot be caught, that perhaps does not exist at all (a wild goose chase). Instead of following the sheep the main character embraces his life for what it is, all the suffering and pain, but all the beauty at the same time. Despite the meaninglessness of it he finds point in living. In the end having nothing left in his life he sits on a beach to cry, but possibly less over his lost life than over what Camus would call the "gentle indifference of the world". This is an existentialist awakening. He could, at this point, be considered an existentialist hero. He has discovered that the meaning in his life lays not in what he does with it, or in some greater truth beyond it, but in himself, and in his love of the world around him. In the end the main character has lost everything in his life, and though he cries it could be said that he is, at last, truly happy.
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Summary: Don't ask for it to make sense
Review: Just good writing. Magic realism done better than most. Murakami nails the genre perfectly.
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Summary: don't fear dark hallways and men in sheep costumes
Review: don't fear dark hallways and men in sheep costumes. that's what i got out of haruki murakami's novel, "a wild sheep chase." this was the second book that i read by this accomplished writer. be sure you read this book before you get to "dance, dance, dance." that book is the sequel to "a wild sheep chase." i love this book out of all of murakami's finely-crafted tales for many reasons. the characters represent Japanese people who belong outside the norm of typical Japanese society, i.e. corporate business men. his characters are very independent and do what they please without any regard to others around them. they work when they want and enjoy life and hardships to the fullest. i admire murakami's ability to create interesting characters. that is the single reason why i always pick up his new books and reread all his previous ones. the story is a strange one. it begins with a divorce and carries on to a strange search for a particular sheep. sounds weird, right? don't let it discourage you from reading this book. i am sure you may get perplexed at times but that is the fun in reading this novel much like all of murakami's work. sometimes you are astonished by what takes place and sometimes you feel right at home because it's something that you would have done or considered doing yourself.
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Summary: Mystical Sheep, Perfect Ears, and an Extraordinary Adventure
Review: This is the first book of Murakami's I've ever read, and if they're all this fun and bizarre, it won't be the last book I read. I can't say I fully understand this book (in fact, I'd be pretty suspicious of anyone who said they did completely understand it!) but it was fully enjoyable. The ending was certainly unexpected, it definitely left me wondering what would happen to the protagonist. An ordinary man experiencing an extraordinary adventure ... his quest to find a mysterious sheep ... if I had to describe this book to someone who's never read it I wouldn't be able to do it without explaining the entire book! All I can say is this: READ THIS BOOK! You won't regret it!
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Summary: Don't wait, start to be a Haruki's fan
Review: I have been a Haruki's fan for 3 years, and the Wild Sheep Chase is my all time favourite of him. I have read this book in Chinese before, and the English translation is also terrific. If you haven't read any book of Haruki before, I would recommend you to start with this. The Wild Sheep Chase is a bit of an extension from Pinball 1979, but you can also read it as an individual story, since only the characters' names are repeated. Like all other Haruki's stories I have read (I read almost every work of him), this book gave me a good taste in my mouth for quite a long time, and I kept re-read the whole book again and again whenever I have time. You probably think that my opinions are biased given the fact that I am Haruki's big fan, but I hope you can give it a try and I am sure that you won't be disappointed.
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Summary: A Book of Surprising Tautness and Excitement
Review: Murakami's novel provides a elegy to the mystery writers that inspired him (especially Chandler), the American jazz and cigarettes that fueled his passion, and a delicate sense of a novelist's balance while mixing mystery, science fiction and passion. It is, as the daughter of a friend who read the book told me, a very strange little book. Through the lead character, Murakami develops a sense of presence with the reader that is both distant and intimate, incisively cool and restrained and yet warmly intimate. Clear a landmark novel, the work is exceptionally well translated. No devote reader of the modern novel should miss this book.
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