A Wild Sheep Chase

Okay, so I'm lagging on putting up pictures. In the meantime, though, I'm going to say a few words about stuff I'm reading. I just read this novel, "A Wild Sheep Chase", by the Japanese author Haruki Murakami.

Its a weird one, although anyone who has read any Murakami won't be surprised by this in the slightest. The only other work of his I had read prior was The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which was also bizarre, but not only that, sometimes incoherent, or at least disparate. Partially, this was from its length; The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle clocks in at about 625 pages, and frequently feels like its really three stories chopped up and interspliced within the two covers.


A Wild Sheep Chase, however, is about 300 pages, and much more coherent. Its story is such: it follows a nameless protagonist on his quest to find a sheep that shouldn't exist, that was in a photo he had used while creating an advertisement at his small PR firm. After publishing that advertisement, a visit was made by a man in a fancy suit telling him basically that a) he had to cease the ad and b) he had to go find that sheep, or else his life would be ruined in every way imaginable.


See, now apparently this sheep is in fact a Mongolian sheep god, that jumped inside the body of a boring Japanese man in the 1930s, while they were off raping the lands of Manchuria and even more southerly in China, and this man, upon realizing he was possessed by a sheep god, told the army so, and they quietly discharged him. Somewhere in the process the sheep jumped out, and shortly thereafter found its way into another otherwise boring Japanese man; this sheep god's plans for a global ... something, leads it to essentially overwhelm this man's consciousness, turning him overnight into a political powerhouse, and over the next few decades he becomes the boss of Japan's right-wing political party, but is entirely behind the scenes in doing so.


And I guess the boss is now dying. So this guy in the suit wants the protagonist to find the sheep in hopes itll help the boss, because i guess you're immortal as long as a sheep god stays inside of you.


...



Crazy, right? Well, it's all tongue-in-cheek, and the characters mostly think its crazy themselves. The protagonist is absolutely a normal, everyday guy, and reacts to this bizarre information the way you or I would.

I don't know nearly enough about Japanese politics to be certain, but I suspect that this book is mostly a critique of Japanese politics. What little I do know is that Japan, for a long time, has essentially had a one party system inheriting the throne in the wake of the emperor being forced to abdicate power after WWII, and that this political party has always been known as "the right wing". They're nothing like the right wing in places like, say, America, but are pretty hardcore.

My guess is that Murakami is trying to say something about the leaders of the right-wing being just as little as the guy who was inhabited by the sheep. That there's nothing special or distinguishing about them, but that they were just in the right place at the right time, and events forced them onto the stage whether they deserved it or not. He's clearly a critic, and its not hard to know why, even from the little I do know about Jap. politics. His work is usually critical of Japanese society anyway, and it seems like he more or less mourns modernization, but perhaps I'm being a little too harsh on him.



Anyway, the book itself is a pretty light and easy read, and has a few surprisingly delightful small characters. I guess this was written early in his career, and I think at times it shows, as he has a tendency to rely on exposition perhaps just a little too much. Nevertheless, its nothing if not entertaining, and was definitely worth my time, seeing as it was primarily a way for me to kill time while waiting for an airplane, and then getting to my destination via that airplane.


* * * 3/5 stars if you ask me.

~Kiel