He goes along with all scenarios and suggestions as if he’s in an improv act-saying “yes, and” to everything-which allows the book to shuffle all the way to its offbeat conclusion. I’m not usually a fan of overly passive narrators, but this narrator’s passivity makes the book more interesting. Ever since the sheep departed, I can’t tell how much is really me and how much the shadow of the sheep.” (224-225)Įvents are strung together in a coincidental way with very little seeming to happen with intention. “To the sheep’s thinking, of course it’s good.” What the sheep seeks is the embodiment of sheep thought.” “As I said before, I can’t express that in words with any precision. To the sheep that would probably mean a new person to put on top of the organization by one scheme or another.” “It has roamed all over Japan to search out a new host. The Sheep Professor picked up the photograph from the desk and gave it a flick of his fingers. Along the way, the narrator meets other people who the sheep inhabited for a period of time, but no one can make sense of what the sheep is or what it wants: The reason for the narrator’s quest is that this sheep used to inhabit a major right-wing figure called “the Boss” who, on the brink of death, needs the sheep to save his life. The quest for the sheep occurs in something close enough to the real world, but the sheep itself is surreal. Or else.Ī Wild Sheep Chase has that dreamlike quality of making sense in the moment and making no sense at all when you recount the details later. They hire the narrator for an all-expense-paid quest to find the sheep in a month’s time.

This photo includes a sheep with a star on its back, and the star is soon noticed by people searching for this particular sheep. A Wild Sheep Chase follows an unnamed narrator after he uses a friend’s photo in a print advertisement. This book is considerably stranger than After Dark, even if it’s easier to summarize.

A Wild Sheep Chase is the second book I’ve read by Haruki Murakami, and once again I’m struggling with a review.

Murakami a wild sheep chase