A wild sheep chase

Format:

Book

Title:

A wild sheep chase

Uniform Title:

Hitsuji o meguru bōken. English

Author:

Murakami, Haruki, 1949- author.

ISBN:

9780870119057

9784770014054

Edition:

First edition.

Publication:

Tokyo ; New York, N.Y. : Kodansha International, [1989]

Physical Description:

299 pages ; 24 cm

General Note:

Front jacket illustration by Shigeo Okamoto.

Translation of: Hitsuji o meguru bōken.

Summary:

It begins simply enough: A twenty-something advertising executive receives a postcard from a friend, and casually appropriates the image for an insurance company's advertisement. What he doesn't realize is that included in the pastoral scene is a mutant sheep with a star on its back, and in using this photo he has unwittingly captured the attention of a man in black who offers a menacing ultimatum: find the sheep or face dire consequences. Thus begins a surreal and elaborate quest that takes our hero from the urban haunts of Tokyo to the remote and snowy mountains of northern Japan, where he confronts not only the mythological sheep, but the confines of tradition and the demons deep within himself.

Subject(s):

Japanese fiction -- 20th century.

Sheep -- Fiction.

Genre:

Japanese fiction -- 20th century -- Translations into English.

Magic realist fiction.

Humorous fiction.

Japanese fiction

Added Author:

Birnbaum, Alfred

Okamoto, Shigeo, 1929-2011,

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Newberg Public Library	FICTION MURAKAMI	Searching... Unknown

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On Order

Summary

Features a cast of bizarre characters, including a sheep with a mysterious star on its back, caught up in a Nietzschean quest for power."

Author Notes

Haruki Murakami was born on January 12, 1949 in Kyoto, Japan and studied at Tokyo's Waseda University. He opened a coffeehouse/jazz bar in the capital called Peter Cat with his wife. He became a full-time author following the publication of his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, in 1979.

He writes both fiction and non-fiction works. His fiction works include Norwegian Wood, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, The Strange Library, and Men Without Women. Several of his stories have been adapted for the stage and as films. His nonfiction works include What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. He has received numerous literary awards including the Franz Kafka Prize for Kafka on the Shore, the Yomiuri Prize for The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and the Jerusalem Prize. He has translated into Japanese literature written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver, Truman Capote, John Irving, and Paul Theroux.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews (3)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Immensely popular in Japan, the author's first novel to be published here is a comic combination of disparate styles: a mock-hardboiled mystery, a metaphysical speculation and an ironic first-person account of an impossible quest. The narrator is a modern Japanese yuppie: divorced, in a mildly exciting relationship and a much less exciting job as an ad copywriter, he lives unexceptionally until a photograph throws his life into chaos. The snapshot, which he uses to illustrate a newsletter, shows a field of sheep with one unique crossbreed, and the picture is special enough to have attracted the attention of both the nomadic friend who sent it to him and a right-wing Mr. Big who, moribund, wants the source found before he dies. The Boss's henchman, a sleek, scary majordomo, gives the narrator one month to track it down, and the story that ensues is a postmodern detective novel in which dreams, hallucinations and a wild imagination are more important than actual clues. With the help of a fluid, slangy translation, Murakami emerges as a wholly original talent. $30,000 ad/promo; Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternates. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Choice Review

Published in 1982 in Japan, this strikingly original novel now appears for the first time in the West. Murakami, a writer whose domestic sales have been phenomenal, even in terms of the book-mad Japanese market has written a suspenseful quest story ostensibly premised on, of all things, a sheep with mysterious markings and the locale where it had been photographed. The book succeeds as fiction even as it seems a natural subject for cinematic treatment. Its narrator is a fellow pushing 30, who has fallen out with his wife and in with a woman whose ears obsess him. But to begin plot summary here is only to obfuscate. Displaying few of the traditional adornments of specifically Japanese fiction, A Wild Sheep Chase manages to ring international chimes: its characters are familiar with what is being read and listened to in Europe and America; and indeed, there are inklings of magic realism here, not to mention the films of Antonioni. The author has himself translated a number of contemporary American fictionists into Japanese--not, apparently including Thomas Pynchon, though that writer seems to have been familiar to him as well. But in a sense, the novel is also a voyage into theJapanese past, as the pursuit of the "strayed" sheep takes the narrator into the era of the settling of Hokkaido, and into the interior of that island itself. This is fascinating reading made easier by the felicitous translation by Alfred Birnbaum. Recommended. -J. M. Ditsky, University of Windsor

Library Journal Review

This novel, the American debut of a popular contemporary Japanese writer, will have a familiar ring to Western ears. The narrative moves adroitly through mystery, fable, pensive realism, and modernist absurdity to tell the tale--at least on the surface--of a Japanese man caught up in a puzzling quest for a somewhat mystical sheep. The spare style echoes Raymond Carver, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler, with matter-of-fact absurdities reminiscent of John Irving and, in less inspired moments, Tom Robbins. While the climax of the story is somewhat unrewarding, many readers will enjoy being pulled along by the playful and engaging style and fluid structure. Interesting as an example of current Japanese writing and as an unusually hip and irreverent look at contemporary Japanese society, this would be a nice addition to larger fiction collections.-- Mark Woodhouse, Elmira Coll., N.Y. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.