A Wild Sheep Chase

To some extent it does exactly what it says on the tin. The sense of gathering pointlessness (or sheeplessness?) is palpable after what was a very engaging first hundred pages or so.

So, this third novel by Murakami falls a little way short of his later achievemements, but it is interesting nonetheless to observe the formation of the style that would distinguish them. There's plenty of enjoyable, dry comedy in the set-up scenes, but when it comes to the meatier underlying themes, there appears to be less behind the internal mythology of this novel compared to that of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle for example.

I did however enyoy the many deadpan metaphysical musings of Murakami's unnamed Sheep chaser, a self-confessed mediocrity working in Tokyo's advertising industry. "There are symbolic dreams, dreams that symbolise some reality. Then there are symbolic realities, realities that symbolise a dream," he advises us.

This character takes a big step towards a bizarre symbolic reality far away from the mediocre realists and mediocre dreamers that populate his profession when his firm is visited one day by a man who "spoke as if running a white glove over a tabletop...a refined piece of bad news." This sinsister individual identifies himself as the right-hand man of the formerly sheep-inhabited "boss", a right-wing figure that controls the underside of Japan's communications industry, and quickly twists the narrator's arm, giving him little alternative but to go off in search of the boss's misplaced supernatural sheep.

Together with his girlfriend, a rather plain call-girl that becomes utterly ravishing whenever she 'unblocks' her ears, he follows the trail to Hokkaido and checks into the Dolphin Hotel, whose "undistinguishedness was metaphysical...most likely it was run down when it was built." And that's when things start to get very strange, starting with their encounter upstairs with the proprietor's father, an old man called The Sheep Professor, the very "personification of an unrewarded life" and "the hell of sheeplessness".

Below, a few more of the narrator's more arresting observations:

"We habitually cut out bits of time to suit us, so we tend to fool ourselves that time is our size, but it really goes on and on. "

"I lose track of where I stop and where my sex appeal begins."

"People start ageing from early, very early on. Gradually it spreads over their entire body like a stain that cannot be wiped away."

"Age certainly hasn't conferred any smarts on me. Character maybe, but mediocrity is a constant, as one Russian writer put it. "

"There's that kind of money in the world, it aggravates you to have it, makes you miserable to spend it and you hate yourself when it's gone."

"I just can't get it through my head that here and now is really here and now. Or that I am really me. It doesn't quite hit home. It's always been this way. "

"The second whisky is always my favourite."