Haruki Murakami's 'A Wild Sheep Chase' creates magical world

Can a woman have such beautiful ears that she has to keep them hidden away to live a normal life? Can a sheep with a mark of the red star occupy the souls of men and spur them to reach great heights in their society? Can the search for this sheep change a man’s fortunes so much that he has to close down his business, lose his girlfriend and make so much money all in a space of a month? And what secret does a man simply known as “The Rat” hold that could unlock the mystery of the sheep?
These are the questions that jump to mind on reading Haruki Murakami’s novel, A Wild Sheep Chase.
Yet, the novel — first published in 1982 in Tokyo as Hitsujio Meguru Boken — is hard to place. Is it a mythology? There are flashes of mythology running throughout the otherwise modern urban narrative. Is it a detective story? But the unnamed protagonist is not a detective. He is just another bored, hard-smoking small-time PR executive until a mysterious man walks into his office and gives him the seemingly impossible assignment to go on a wild sheep chase in the hills of Hokaido, Japan. Is the book a romance? It cannot be because the main character is a self-obsessed man who is more contended chasing the wild thoughts coursing through his mind than he is in winning over the hearts of the women in his life, including the part-time call girl-cum-editor with the beautiful ears.
Some critics have described it as a comic and in the final analysis it is an engrossing book to read and may be that is all that matters.
It is interesting that the novel — despite having been written thirty years ago — has this year been occupying prominent display positions in European bookshelves. Is it because Murakami, the author, is enjoying a renaissance or is it because he also wrote the much-acclaimed IQ84, which was published in three volumes, the first of which came out in 2009 and the last in 2010?
In one of the blurbs on the cover, a reviewer from the Sunday Herald says: “Murakami is a true original and yet in many ways he is also like Franz Kafka’s successor because he seems to have the intelligence to know what Kafka truly was — a comic writer”.
Murakami originally writes in Japanese and his books have been translated into English, with A Wild Sheep Chase being first published in the UK in 2000 (by Havill Press) and later by Vintage in 2003.
According to Wikipedia, the first edition of IQ84 — a tome in its own right — was sold out on the first day and went on to sell a million copies in the first month of publication. This, then, vindicates the renewed interest in his earlier works, including A Wild Sheep Chase.
The New York Times Book review rightly notes that “there isn’t a kimono to be found in A Wild Sheep Chase. Its main characters, men and women, wear Levis.”
Indeed, were it not that the plot is set in Tokyo and a remote village Hokaido, this is a story that could have been set anywhere, even the windy hills of Mau where it is not uncommon to find sheep grazing in the undulating grasslands that were once forests. And this underlines Murakami’s reputation as an international writer.