A Wild Sheep Chase (The Rat, #3)

A Wild Sheep Chase (The Rat #3)

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3.93 of 5 stars 3.93  ·  rating details  ·  27,943 ratings  ·  1,475 reviews
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 inc...more
Paperback, 353 pages
Published April 9th 2002 by Vintage (first published 1982)
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7th out of 17 books — 292 voters


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Community Reviews

(showing 1-30 of 3,000)
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Joel
Reading Murakami is like experiencing someone else's dream. Trying to review Murakami is like trying to remember your own -- scattered events, confusing narrative lapses, inexplicable elements, petrified whale penises. A series of images:

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seven-stars-limited-edit-m 135-Sapporo-draft

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And then you wake up. And wonder what that was all about.
Megha
'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 also several...more
Mariel
Oct 21, 2010 Mariel rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Miss New Zealand
Recommended to Mariel by: Little Bo Peeping Tom


I wish I could have written about Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase here when I'd read it. I wish that goodreads was around back then. The magical and plain old world as we know it life through best teacher voice (this is my favorite kind of voice because I'm a confused person) that made the every day seem full of possibilities. Sinister possibilities as well as good ones. That's my favorite kind of thing, the ability to make that stuff interesting, with easy humor. I'm really into the build-up of t...more
Chris
Oct 18, 2007 Chris rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Fans of the impossible and the fantastic.
Shelves: translations
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 enty...more
Jaci
Apr 01, 2008 Jaci rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: people who want a rather light read that can develop into something deeper
Shelves: read-in-2008, own
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 we...more
param
Jul 24, 2012 param rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: patient readers, lovers of language
This is not an easy book to read, review or discuss. You will either love it or hate it (more likely - never read it). I liked it. The swirling, kaleidoscopic imagery with freely overlapping of the physical and the metaphysical, the real and the imaginary, the utterly sane and the completely cuckoo makes us question what is real and what is not.

For a tranquil setup, the Prelude (the first 7 pages) whizzed by before I even realized. And I was appropriately intrigued. By page 20, I don’t know wha...more
Phoebe
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 pages (of a 350-page book) is really that su...more
Zenmoon
Feb 04, 2013 Zenmoon rated it 5 of 5 stars  ·  review of another edition Recommends it for: Just about everyone ... spread the world with Murakami

Our hand-reared cockatiel is on borrowed time if she continues to peck lumps off the books on my Murakami shelf. Clearly, she likes his books as well (but for different reasons than me). She moved from 1Q84 (unread), to this book, as the little bite marks attest.

Vacuum the paper trail. Breathe. Ahhhhhhhhh.

Oh my goodness, every time I read this man I swoon with admiration. There’s something extremely comforting for me, knowing I’m in the hands of a masterful technician of the written word like M...more
Bettie


Translated from the Japanese by Alfred Birnbaum

Opening: It was a short one-paragraph item in the morning edition. A friend rang me up to read it to me. Nothing special. Something a rookie reporter fresh out of college might've written for practice.

Ginko leaves strewn across the ground.

#60 TBR Busting 2013

Also have the audio file:(view spoiler)[

A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami
Read by Rupert Degas
Naxos, 8 CDs, 9:35

A Wild Sheep Chase is one of Murakami's most fantastical novels. An advertisin
...more
Tosh
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 be almost any large city in...more
Alden
First Read: Three out of five (3/5) stars

A Wild Sheep Chase is a Murakami masterpiece which will take you to what seems to be a crazy wild ride. It focuses on an unnamed male character (as always) – a divorced man who works in an advertising firm and ended up going on a wild sheep chase that involves the most surreal characters you could ever imagine -- a sheep man, a sheep professor, a girl with exquisite ears that improves sex drive, a dolphin hotel, a rat, and some endless possibilities. To t...more
Jordi Via
"La caza del carnero sin nombre"
Cinco estrellas le di por la primera lectura (la leí cuando tenía treinta y un años), y cuatro en la segunda, 8 años después.
Quitaría cuescos y pedos y alguna parte rimbombante.
Pero en general y, sobre todo la parte final, consigue que uno se vuelva a reconciliar con su antiguo yo; comprender por qué me gustó tanto la primera vez y por qué he sido un poco más crítico esta segunda. Sólo por eso, por lograr que viaje en el tiempo y me vea de nuevo en "aquella" sit...more
Jelle Peersman
Murakami's first widely published novel. It took me a while to get into this one, the first 30 pages or so went very slowly. This is the fourth book by him I've read and it seems to me that Murakami wasn't yet running at full speed with this one. All the Murakami-typical elements are here: a cat, solitude, girls, cooking, smoking, drinking and also crazy shit. There are great parts in here: the Dolphin hotel, the chauffeur and the mystery surrounding the man in the black suit and the sheep, the...more
Liz*
The photography of a wild sheep has appeared on a magazine. A story about obsessive quests, unfruitful chases, memories of what's been lost, weakness, casual sex, beautiful ears, loneliness, being nameless, the constant of mediocrity, inside demons. And an unexpected supernatural touch.

Some facts about reading this book:
* It's my first Murakami. After this weird dream I had a few weeks ago, I just felt like reading some of his work. Thank's to The Holy Terror, I decided to start with this one.

*...more
Auggie
Creepy.....as....hades.

But that's why I loved it!!!

I'm serious. This book was so creepy it had me wiggling around in my seat in discomfort. Yet, I was absolutely captivated! I couldn't put the book down!

If you're a reader looking for a book that will take you more than one read to truly grasp, then this is the book for you. It had my brain churning and my fingers tapping with nervous energy.

I'm not going to give a bit of a run-down of the book as I've done in previous review mostly because it wo...more
Jason
Dec 17, 2012 Jason added it
Shelves: read-2010
What makes Murakami so worth reading is his deceptive simplicity. His prose is very simple, with no fantastical vocabulary (except for food), no heavy reliance on wordplay or overuse of simile and metaphor for description. Even more so, his stories build, starting ordinarily, then slowly adding a dose of the surreal--not in events, but in the portrayal of them. In A Wild Sheep Chase, nearly everyone and everything is a pronoun.

When you finish the novel, you may very well have forgotten how it b...more
Amanda
Aug 05, 2010 Amanda rated it 3 of 5 stars
Recommended to Amanda by: Sam Rosenberg
Shelves: book-club
I think most accurately 3.5 stars.

Exactly what it purports to be: a wild sheep chase. Our protagonist sets out to a far corner of Japan in search of a mutant sheep on a deadline imposed by a mysteriously powerful man in black. Along the way we meet a girl with beautiful ears, the perhaps saddest cat in a Murakami book yet, a chaffeur who calls up God every night, and many people associated with sheep.

I actually liked A Wild Sheep Chase better than some of the other Murakami fiction I've read (so...more
Gerrard
No se si A Wild Sheep Chase pertenece al realismo mágico, al postmodernismo o a la novela de detectives, pero al parecer es ya parte de la firma de Murakami el balancearse indiscretamente entre estos generos.

Protagonista, Rata, J, Novia, Secretario, Chofer, Hombre Oveja, Profesor Oveja, son todos parte de un Japón que se ha recuperado de la guerra solo en apariencia, pero que soporta con un orgullo terco y en secreto heridas muy profundas, un Japón en que la tecnología avanza demasiado rápido, d...more
Herrikias
Jan 21, 2008 Herrikias rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Animist anticapitalists
Recommended to Herrikias by: Sonja
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
A&E
The latest Murakami I read was also my first: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, given to me by Nina for my fifteenth birthday. It is widely considered as the "poster boy" book for Murakami, with the inconspicuous and jaded narrator and his wild search for something even he cannot understand, and all the strange and fantastic elements and characters he meets along the way.

And though a lot of themes and small details from Wind-Up Bird reappeared in Sheep Chase, I think I became more emotionally involved...more
Yulia
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 and...more
Nated Doherty
Jul 04, 2007 Nated Doherty rated it 3 of 5 stars  ·  review of another edition 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 book are gre...more
Anna
Apr 10, 2009 Anna rated it 3 of 5 stars 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, but...more
Lisa
Sep 22, 2007 Lisa rated it 4 of 5 stars 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 example...more
Bina
Jul 30, 2007 Bina rated it 5 of 5 stars 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 it was no matter thanks to this book.

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 potential for creative genius in our times.

Its sequel, Dance,...more
Sergsab
Una fuerza de voluntad que domina a aquel que la posee. Unas orejas que atraen acontecimientos extraordinarios. La crisis de los 30 más reveladora reflejada nunca en una novela. Un Murakami del pasado rescatado mucho tiempo después.

La técnica del autor no está definida del todo. Pero la brutalidad de lo no tratado surge aquí como borbotones de agua. Menos sofisticado, pero de dentellada certera.

Cierre perfecto en su simplicidad y amplitud de miras.


Amber
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
maria
dear murakami,

seriously.

best,

m.

p.s. one of the things i have noticed about murakami which is quite specific to me (perhaps?) is how utterly he destroys me. i find myself being taken into a world of symbols and thoughts and characters that bring me through to strangely heightened dreams and feelings and thoughts in the meanwhile of reading. there is something deeply connective about the lonliness that permeates his work. the lonliness as he defines it. the sense of a singular individual and their...more
Jodie
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 contrast setti...more
Julie Tridle
I loved it. Easy read. No characters you hate. Wonderful language. Effortless mix of realism and not-so-realism. No boring spots (that I detected.) No lack of things to think about. Sheep. What's not to love? Will definitely seek out more Murakami soon.
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The Rat 15 139 11 hours, 31 min ago  
Mic Breaks Only: Wild Sheep Chase: Fin! (Full Book Discussion) 3 10 May 05, 2013 04:48am  
Mic Breaks Only: Sheep: Shear Hell : Part 6 - 7 3 3 Mar 23, 2013 05:42pm  
Mic Breaks Only: Sheep: The Ear & The Rat: Part 1 - 5 4 3 Mar 16, 2013 07:50am  
Mic Breaks Only: Wild Sheep: Page 0: Links & Notations 3 3 Mar 14, 2013 12:29pm  
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Haruki Murakami (村上 春樹) is a popular contemporary Japanese writer and translator. His work has been described as 'easily accessible, yet profoundly complex'.

Since childhood, Murakami has been heavily influenced by Western culture, particularly Western music and literature. He grew up reading a range of works by American writers, such as Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and he is often disting...more
More about Haruki Murakami...
Kafka on the Shore Norwegian Wood The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle 1Q84 Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

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