I WAS GIVEN this by two different people sixteen years apart, which seems a strong hint from the universe that I ought to read it. I had already read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and enjoyed it...so why not?
Back in 2012, the New York Times Book Review published a cartoon titled "Haruki Murakami Bingo," in which the player could claim a square whenever an item like "mysterious woman" or "ear fetish" or "old jazz record" turned up in a Murakami novel. As the friend who was the second person to give me the book as a present remarked, A Wild Sheep Chase would make one a quick winner in Haruki Murakami Bingo. It has everything.
It's 1970. A Tokyo advertising man in his later 20s is adrift--his marriage is breaking up, he is weary of his career, he is suffering from a vague anomie--when it is unexpectedly given an assignment he must fulfill, or else: find a sheep born with a black star on its hindquarters.
Joining forces with a mysterious woman with beautiful ears with whom he has frequent and robust sex (three squares right there), he pursues a series of leads to the northernmost regions of Japan's northernmost island, Hokkaido, where he...
...well, let's just say it works out. The details of the plot seem less important, less Murakami-esque, than the atmosphere of surreal noir dread peppered with Japanese historical and cultural references.
Another friend once remarked to me that the Japanese have a predilection for re-creating the creations of other cultures (Chinese poetry, Scotch whiskey, American noir), and the re-creations moreover and mysteriously both achieve uncanny fidelity and remain resolutely and unmistakably Japanese. It's a neat trick, and Murakami is a master of it.
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