A Wild Sheep Chase

"This all has got to be, patently, the most unbelievable, the most ridiculous story I have ever heard."

Well, not my least favorite Murakami book to date (that'd be 1Q84). Started slow and puzzlingly, but managed to pull me in by the halfway point.

Our protagonist (from the first two Rat books) has a bit of a business problem. When designing a travel brochure, he unthinkingly uses the image his friend Rat sent him months previous of an idyllic hillside, mountain in the background, and sheep scattered on the grass. A mysterious man contacts him to demand he locate one of the sheep in the photo, a special sheep with a star on its back. What follows is a weird romp in rural Japan involving a sheep professor, a girl with unblocked, exquisite ears, and a guy in a skinsuit/sheep costume.

Yeah, typical Murakami, right?

I won't begin to summarize the themes of this book, because it's very literary and I'm pretty sure a large chunk went over my head. I enjoyed the fever dream of tracking down the sheep though, and thought this was a great follow on to the previous two books in this series. It really shows how far Murakami had come as a writer by the time he got to this book. It's very trippy, and really only for people who know what they're getting into with Murakami.

What a great and fun introduction to Murakami's works and imaginative world. It drags a little at times, but it's always interesting, odd, and contemplative. Even at its most ridiculous, it is subdued and understated, as if nothing is wrong and weird. And I loved it. It was fun, but not (how do I put it) exciting? Thrilling? So if that's what you want out of a fantastical mystery, this isn'it it. But if you're looking for a fun, quirky book with moments of beauty and profundity that presses into the isolation of the human experience and the temptations of the pursuit for meaning in the midst of absurdity, this just might be it.

Excellent except that the ending underwhelmed me. It's possible that there was something to get that I just missed, but it seemed like he had hit some sort of predefined page limit and was like “Well, time to wrap it up.”