A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami

ISBN-10: 0099448777
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 2003
299 pgs
Translator: Alfred Birnbaum


It all begins when a young advertising executive (whose name is never revealed throughout the whole story but based on a first person narrative) receives a postcard from a friend. It is a snapshot of a herd of sheep but amid of these sheep there is one unique breed with a star on its back. He had used this shot as an illustration onto a newsletter for a company and it seems it has captured someone else's attention.

That someone is a mysterious person dressed in black who refuses to indulge to his questions but gave him a time limit to track that one particular special sheep or else he would face a consequence (meaning he would lose everything).

The narrator and his wife had divorced some time back and it is not like he is committed to anything, moreover his life is a blah but he get acquainted with a girl with a pair of beautiful ears (in fact he is obsessed with them). You will find out more about his acquaintance with the girl though but this is not the main issue of the story (which it led me into believing it in the beginning).

The girl encouraged him to this wild sheep chase, not that he has a choice to begin with. And thus, the narrator begins his quest which takes him from the urban Tokyo to the remote, snowy mountains of northern Japan. From there the story takes on like a detective story as the narrator will have to find all means and he will meet some strange people (a Sheep Man who wore a full sheepskin costume and speak with a rush) and some unexplainable events that will throw you offguard.

To tell you honestly, I was a little confused with the story in the beginning and it took me a while to get into it. In Haruki Murakami's style, there is always something extraordinary about his stories that make his readers get sucked into them. And then, there is something beautiful about his writing that made me forget about the confusion in a while and be drawn into it. The more I read it, the more I am drawn to the narrator's chaotic world (never mind if it is all caused by a sheep or dreams and hallucinations are parts of it). At times, it read like a mythology but yet it seems more like a mystery especially towards the middle half of the story. To me, these two are enough to make me get sucked into this wild adventure.

I will leave you with some passages about the sheep (whether or not if they are true, I do not know) that had me chuckling :

"Do sheeps quarrel?" asked my girlfriend.

"You bet they quarrel," said the caretaker. "It's the same with any animal that goes around in groups. Each and every sheep has a pecking order in the sheep society. If there's fifty sheep in a pen, then there's number one sheep right down to number fifty sheep. And each one knows exactly where it belongs."

"But if they all know their place, why should they fight?"

"Say one sheep gets hurt and loses its strength, its position becomes unstable. So the sheep under it get feisty and try for better position. When that happens, they're at it for three days. The sheep that gets the boot, when it was young, gave some other sheep the boot, after all. And when it all comes down to the butcher block, there's no number one or number fifty. Just one happy barbecue."

"When you're raising sheep, the most important thing you got to keep an eye on is mating. So you keep 'em separate, the males with the males, the females with the females. Generally, it's the strongest number one male. In other words, you're serving up the best seed. After a month, when all the business is done, this stud ram gets returned to the males-only pen. But during the time the stud's been busy, the other males have worked out a new pecking order. And there' s no way he can win a fight. So all the other males gang up on him. Now that's a sad story."

"How do sheep fight?"

"They bump heads. Sheep foreheads are hard as steel and all hollow inside."