A Wild Sheep Chase

A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami has by far been the weirdest and psychological thriller I have ever read in my life. A Wild Sheep Chase is a novel about a character that throughout the whole entire novel remains nameless. Through a series of events that change his life and his obtaining of a picture of one peculiar sheep, he goes on a trip to find a elusive sheep. This sheep, which no one can identify it’s breed and has a star on its back, has a peculiar way of entering and possessing humans that it meets and forever changing its life, for better and worse. What got me really hooked and thoroughly invested in this book is the progression in the story, as the events of the novel slowly creep up in weirdness that one barely notices the weirdness at all.

The novel starts off like many light novels generally found in Japan. Starting off like a normal story of one’s life in Japan, it slowly but surely takes on the story of a curious ghost story. This slow shift is something I have not come across in novels, and it did a very good job into luring me into the story. By not suddenly present the horror like in most horror novels and movies; it trapped me into reading it towards the end. This is because even if I did want to quit, since I already am in the climax of the story before I even realize it, I have the strong urge to find out what happens in the end. The surreal aspect of the novel also is curious because I did not find an area of the novel where the shift really occurred. To the talking of someone’s ears as being cute, to a novel and curious story of a town being built far away in the mountains, the story hardly has a clear shift to the horror.

This is also the first novel where the main character of the novel does not have a name. I think that Haruki Murakami is doing what a lot of Japanese writers are known for doing, putting us into the psyche of the main character by not giving us to much information about the main character. Unlike most western novels who often have strong main characters, this novel allows us to fill the roles of this unfortunate man as he struggles to figure out everything in his life. This gives us a more introspective look into his life and we are more engaged because we ourselves feel the ridiculousness of the main character.