Jesse’s Reviews > A Wild Sheep Chase > Status Update

Umm at this point the ear woman is gone, and we are confronted with the Sheep Man, a man dressed in a sheep costume who speaks in sentences compressed into single words. It’s a fun moment, and what the sheep says calls everything about the MC’s relationship with the ear woman into question. Like, what is going on here???

We finally get to the root of the weird fiction concept. This isn’t just a sheep but a sheep spirit that blesses people, working out its own agenda while it dwells inside people, then leaving them when their usefulness has been eclipsed. You get the feeling that The Rat may be the current vessel for the sheep since it left the leader of the shadow government.

So we are now in the meat of the “why”. The picture of the sheep is the spitting image of what is effectively the motivating force behind a Japanese shadow government, but there is a curious gap between the leader and the man executing what he assumes is the leader’s will as the former is in a terminal coma. Doubtless we would be better enlightened if the Boss could speak to the photograph of the sheep himself.

The novel starts to stray into a more tense angle with the bizarre drama surrounding the sheep, and then we are blasted with the story of how the MC ended up with the picture of the sheep: it was sent by The Rat, a friend in the previous two novels, and we get two of his letters as well as his quest to touch base with two other people, one of whom is the bar owner, J, from the past two novels.

We are already three women deep into the novel and the third, like a fairy tale, is the Magical Woman who, like the twins, is capable of intuiting what the main character is really thinking about beyond his standoffishness. The difference is, she is more direct in engaging his emotional self. The book beats us over the head with this as she is an EAR model. This isn’t necessarily meant to be erotic.

So, I had planned to read Gravity’s Rainbow, but I would rather not read another Pynchon novel right now—his most critically acclaimed one, too—and Murakami feels like it is going to hit what I want right now from modern lit. I just don’t think that I’m ready to face Gravity’s Rainbow down right after House of Leaves.