A Wild Sheep Chase

by Haruki Murakami

book data

6,278 ratings, 3.92 average rating, 505 reviews (more data...)

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4		42%
3		24%
2		4%
1		0%

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published

April 9th 2002 (first published 1982) by Vintage

binding

Paperback, 353 pages

setting

Japan

isbn

037571894X (isbn13: 9780375718946)

description

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

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10/18/07

Chris rated it:

bookshelves: translations

Read in September, 2007

recommends it for: Fans of the impossible and the fantastic.

When one is approached by a random person and asked to locate a life form that is physically unable to exist, but which you have a picture of, and you choose to do it because you have to, you know you're in for something fantastical. Part noir thriller, part philosophical daydream, the wild sheep chase moves effortlessly along (partially due to the brilliant translation), and scene by scene we are more and more drawn into the story of soon to be thirty year old J. Philosophical detours into en...more

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04/17/09

Megha rated it:

bookshelves: contemporary, next-to-favs

'A Wild Sheep Chase' is a trippy tale with a mix of detective story, myth, fantasy and philosophy. Though it can be enjoyed simply as a fable at its face-value, just a little thought reveals a multi-layered allegory. On one hand, "the sheep" could signify post-war Japan itself. At the same time, the protagonist's sheep chase also ends up being a search for his own identity, his emotions and meaning of his existence. It is as much a physical journey as a spiritual journey. There are als...more

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5 comments

03/17/08

Jaci rated it:

bookshelves: read-in-2008

Read in March, 2008

recommends it for: people who want a rather light read that can develop into something deeper

A Wild Sheep Chase was the third book that I have read by Murakami. I found out after I finished that it is that third book in "The Trilogy of the Rat". The first two books in this series are now out of print, but after reading A Wild Sheep Chase, I think I have to chase down some used copies of the novels and experience the trilogy in full.

I interpreted the novel to be a story of emotion journey more than a story of physical journey. There was an actual journey involved ...more A Wild Sheep Chase was the third book that I have read by Murakami. I found out after I finished that it is that third book in "The Trilogy of the Rat". The first two books in this series are now out of print, but after reading A Wild Sheep Chase, I think I have to chase down some used copies of the novels and experience the trilogy in full.

I interpreted the novel to be a story of emotion journey more than a story of physical journey. There was an actual journey involved as the main character went in search of the mythical sheep, but the true focus of the book was on the character's emotions. Murakami didn't even give the protagonist (or many of the other characters in the novel) a name. The main character could stand for any one of us.

I believe that the mythical sheep can be seen as either "the meaning of life," which sounds cliche but bear with me, or, "what happens when we lose sight of the true meaning of life".

Our main character (let's call him Max for discussion's sake) finds himself at the end of his marriage. His wife have left him for a friend of his, and he can't understand what that guy has that he doesn't, since the friend doesn't have a lot of money and he plays the guitar too much.

The girlfriend that "Max" hooks up with following the breakup of his marriage is a talented, quirky girl who compliments his own quirks nicely. Yet throughout the relationship, he is obsessed with her ears, a part of her, instead of the whole of her. She, on the other hand, has shown herself to be quite devoted to him, even supporting and joining him on his quest for the sheep.

These examples, plus his long-running friendship with his business partner and the company that they ran together, all worked together to form a meaning to his life that "Max" was unable to recognize or embrace. He was on his own sheep chase looking for meaning that he already had. When he finally caught up with The Rat and had their final chat on the mountain, he realized, to a small degree, what he had been doing wrong. The Rat had left everything he knew behind, including a woman who loved him, in search of new environments and new adventure in hope of some new meaning in life. What he ended up doing was forsaking the people and life that cared about him, that gave his existence meaning, and was overtaken by the mythical sheep. The encounter and habitation with the sheep revealed to The Rat that he had wasted his true meaning and life and was now left with an empty existance, when he should have appreciated and found meaning in the path he was originally given. The results for The Rat were thusly catastrophic. "Max", realizing this, leaves the mountainside with no girlfriend, no business, no business partner, and no wife, but with the enlightenment that it is not too late to find meaning in his life.

As a side story, the Sheep Professor serves as a microcosm of the larger plot. Having everything he needed in a profession that he loved and a family who cared for him, he gave it all up and sought "the sheep". He had the sheep as a part of him for a period of time, only to lose even that. In the end he was left with nothing except a son who wished that his father had cared more about him.

I loved the way that "Max's" emotions were described throughout the novel and how through "Max" we can see the results of not appreciating what we have, and also the overall process of what it is like to develop emotionally and truly realize what is important to us, what fulfills us, and what we need to do to keep those things in our lives.(less)

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1 comment

11/18/07

Tosh rated it:

Murakami, even thought he's super famous, is someone I wouldn't read if I read the plots. They sound on the surface too new agey for me. But the fact is he is an incredible craft-style writer that makes you want to turn the page faster and faster. I rarely met a person who doesn't at the very least enjoy his books.

"A Wild Sheep Chase" is one of the first for him to go into a sort of fantasy world - but still based on the world that we know. There's Tokyo but it could b...more

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2 comments

03/10/09

Phoebe North rated it:

bookshelves: dubious-genre-works, friction

Read in March, 2009

The first couple chapters of Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase are beautifully written and very effective--they slowly start to weave a story about a man's unsuccessful romantic relationships. These initial chapters are told with an intense attention to detail, both physical, visceral details and emotional details.

But then the book gets "weird" and takes a nose-dive.

I say "weird" in quotation marks because nothing in the first two hundred and fifty ...more

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01/21/08

Herrikias rated it:

Read in January, 2008

recommended to Herrikias by: Sonja
recommends it for: Animist anticapitalists

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

With expectations set low by The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, this one probably benefited and turned into a pleasant surprise. The directionless main character who seems to meander between odd encounters based on the flows perpetuated by everyone else around him was more endurable. Maybe because there was a base motivation to keep it strung together as opposed to scattershot. Murakami's disdain for the elevating of the rich as beloved is easier to discern here. Maybe the symbol fit this time. T...more

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07/11/07

Yulia rated it:

(review of isbn 0452265169)

bookshelves: by-and-of-japan, i-thought-i-hated-you

Read in January, 2002

This was my first Murakami experience and I don't know if I was adequately prepared for what to expect. In 2002, a guy I was briefly seeing raved about Murakami and gave this book to me with the highest recommendation but, just as our relationship quickly fizzled, so did this book. However much I liked the novel's first half, the aimless and other-worldy ending turned me off Murakami until 2005, when I had to cancel a trip to Japan the day before my flight and ended up going to the hospital an...more

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07/04/07

Nated rated it:

(review of isbn 0099448777)

Read in July, 2007

recommends it for: anyone who's already read Murakami

This book, as others have said, was slow to pick up. Many elements are familiar, seeminly standard washed out Murakami male lead looking lacking meaning. Initially a complete lack of identifiable female characters with ummmm...character...a sense of nhilistic freedom.

Also as others have said, it picks up a great deal around the half way mark, once the character gets on the quest. The sketching of Hokkaido makde me want to go there, as Pat said, the environment, the atmosphere of the ...more

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07/30/07

Bina rated it:

Read in August, 2005

recommends it for: anyone with a pulse

I read this book after being medically evacuated to Singapore, while locked up for a two-day recovery in a French hotel. I couldn't walk very much at the time but was grateful to have an excuse to dwell in the realm of this book without respite.

For me, it is Murakami's best, a lucid dream strung together with some of the most beautiful phrases in literature. At the risk of sounding pathetically infatuated, it made me happy to be alive; it gave me the hope I often lack about the pote...more

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04/10/09

Anna rated it:

Read in March, 2009

recommends it for: Murakami completists only--not a good entry point into his oeuvre.

I have to say that I didn't like it quite so much as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I have yet to encounter anyone who violently dislikes Murakami, but this particular novel contains many of his trademarks carried to such an extreme that I imagine any would-be detractors would certainly hold this particular novel up as reason enough to dismiss his body of work: meandering plot, unsatisfying ending, inexplicably surreal imagery, pop culture allusions. It definitely started out with some promise, b...more

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09/22/07

Lisa rated it:

Read in July, 2007

recommends it for: Fans of great magical realism

I don't know what it is about magical realism that seems most appropriate to a foreign setting. Is it the different-ness of foreign places that allows us to believe that magic hides behind everyday lives, and only a few stumble upon it, or is it the straightforward, bootstraps-hard work-money-success nature of America that precludes it? Either way, this story is a great introduction to Murakami. The story is so interesting and compelling that some of the quirks are barely noticeable. For exa...more

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05/11/08

Amber rated it:

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in May, 2008

I wasn't all that impressed with this book. I love Murakami and have read three other books by him. The ideas in this book are good and some of them kept me thinking and even inspired me to write about them, but the themes took over the book and the plot and characters suffered. I found myself only finishing it in hopes that somehow I would end up being impressed by it, as I was with the Wind Up Bird Chronicle. Whta I did really like about it and this can be said of all his writing is that the s...more

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02/08/08

Jodie rated it:

Read in February, 2008

I have read a few of Haruki Murakami's other books and this was my least favorite. It was simpler and less dreamlike than his other books I have read. I like his books because they don't always make the most sense. This one was about a guy who receives a picture and a letter from a friend with sheep. There's one sheep that is not like the rest. A man proposes a mission to this guy to find this sheep. Or rather he forces the guy to do it. Murakami takes the reader from Tokyo to the contras...more

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04/28/09

Dan rated it:

This was the first book that I read from Murakami. It was recomended to me at the book store, and I must say that I never even considered Japanese literature. I gave it a shot and do not regret it one bit! What an introduction to a new world!

The main charectar is an incredibaly apathetic individual who strives to have a boring life. Goes to work, goes home, drinks a glass of whiskey and goes to bed. Everything changes when he posts a picture containing sheep on a mountain side in an...more

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06/02/09

David rated it:

I am way out of practice on reading novels, I guess. I felt most of the time as though I needed a literature major to tell me what the heck was going on. Not in the micro sense -- there are many scenes of the narrator drinking beer, expressing befuddlement about not being able to find the nonexistent strange sheep he seeks, admiring his girlfriend's beautiful ears, etc., and I could literally tell what was happening. But any larger sense of what the ideas behind the novel were, why a particul...more

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04/13/08

Stuart rated it:

Another of those great Murakami books that gets weirder and weirder by baby steps, slowly and naturally enough that you don't really realize it, until suddenly you're on the other side of the looking-glass and everything's gone haywire. The central obsession here - an evil, murderous sheep - makes perfect sense on a symbolic level, as an icon of Japan's war years, when the nation achieved a deadly symbiosis of sheeplike obedience and bloody mayhem.

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12/14/08

Frederik rated it:

Read in December, 2008

Légérement décevant "A Wild Sheep Chase" montre un jeune Murakami qui n´est pas encore á l´hauteur de son talent. En étant l´un de ses premiers livres, on découvre comment les livres deux décennies plus tard son bien meilleures et plus captivants.

L´historie est originale, mais très bizarre. Au lieu d´être accroché, je le lisais juste pour le terminer.

On pourrait faire la comparaison avec un jeune Bono, qui dans les premiers albums de U2 chante a...more

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05/23/09

Mark rated it:

Read in May, 2009

Murakami likes the trick of folding the senseless into the sensible, tucking the (super)natural back up into the mountains and sheep and other maniacal understatements. Things have this shadow, which is never glanced at directly, but creeps in the periphery.

While explicitly detailing the pursuit of one particular sheep in the boondocks of Japan, A Wild Sheep Chase uses the 'shadow' to good effect. One of its preoccupations is with the boundaries of the self. The main character insist...more

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01/09/09

Stefani rated it:

Read in January, 2009

It took me a LONG time to get into this book. Pick it up, put it down, pick it, put it down, repeat. Honestly, it wasn't until the last 70 pages that I couldn't put it down.

I am reading all of Murakami's books out of order, so I don't know if the repeat imagery and symbolism has a greater meaning to the books, or just to Murakami...Is the Sheepman in A Wild Sheep Chase the same Sheepman as Dance Dance Dance? The same Dolphin Hotel? The same ears?

Dunno. Regardless this...more

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12/09/08

Trin rated it:

bookshelves: fiction, japanese-lit

Read in December, 2008

Well, this is certainly the weirdest Murakami book I’ve read so far. It’s also one of the plottiest, centering, as the title would suggest, around a quest for a sheep. What the American edition of the book doesn’t mention is that it’s actually the third book in a trilogy, the first two volumes of which have been translated into English but aren’t available in the United States (Murakami doesn’t consider them to be his best work). This book actually stands fine on its own, but since I...more

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quotes from this book

"The morning air of the pasture turned steadily cooler. Day by day, the bright golden leaves of the birches turned more spotted as the first winds of winter slipped between the withered branches and across the highlands toward the southeast. Stopping in the center of the pasture, I could hear the winds clearly. No turning back, they pronounced. The brief autumn was gone." More quotes...