A Wild Sheep Chase - Haruki Murakami (1982)
Took me a lot longer to get through this book than I had anticipated.
It reads like a mystery novel with touches of the surreal throughout. In fact, each chapter seems to bring a new red herring—a new direction for the story to travel. You sit there the whole time, wondering…what’s the significance of it all?
The book is paced well—despite being filled with unnamed (Kafka?) characters losing themselves in bouts of philosophical talk. Some of the characters, being total freaks, really reminded me of what you’d find in a David Lynch film.
Overall, it’s an easy read and a good time (353 pages)
Here’s a short plot summary taken from wikipedia:
“This mock-detective tale follows an unnamed Japanese man through Tokyo and Hokkaidō in 1978. The passive, chain-smoking main character gets swept away on an adventure that leads him on a hunt for a sheep that hasn’t been seen for years. The apathetic protagonist meets a woman with magically seductive ears and a strange man who dresses as a sheep and talks in slurs; in this way there are elements of Japanese animism or Shinto. The manipulation of the narrator into the hunt and repeated references to The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes raise connections to “The Red-Headed League.”
