A Wild Sheep Chase (1982) (The Rat, #3) by Haruki Murakami

I read A Wild Sheep Chase just after completing Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 (the two notably rough entries with which Murakami began his writing career) and having previously read Norwegian Wood and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (my dual introductions to both melancholy, introspective, concrete Murakami and magical, weird, surrealist Murakami). I felt after completing these four works I was well-equipped to handle the rest of Murakami's work, and I'll be proceeding in order of publication from here on out.

With Sheep you can feel Murakami beginning to warm up to what would become his signature style. It's hard to compare it to his first two novels as the scope is so much vaster, but it's generally a more worthwhile work in my opinion, with bigger ideas that are more skillfully executed. Gone is the meandering, arbitrary cloud of a narrative that made up his first two novels, replaced by a more structured narrative focused on the oddball MacGuffin that is searching for a demonic, possessive Sheep. This plotline was so weird it was impossible for me to take seriously, which may have been the point. Luckily, this being my 5th Murakami novel, I've long since learned to stop trying to analyze where Murakami's taking me or how he's getting me there and begun to switch off my brain and allow him to do his thing.

This book felt like a rougher first pass of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. While it resolves much of its ambiguity in a far more satisfying way than that book (unsurprising considering Wind-Up Bird was subject to a damaging series of editing upon its translation that removed several key portions of the story), but its pace is not as tight as Bird's, and its diversions and its motifs are not nearly as compelling as those found in its descendant. Sheep starts very slowly and only get moving at a satisfying paced after about two-thirds of the way into it. Wind-Up Bird felt like it was cruising along the entire way and felt much lighter than its 600 pages, while Sheep feels every bit of its 350. I also felt his prose was rougher and that this book lacked some of the more quotable pieces of wisdom often present in Murakami's work, but perhaps that's just subjective. This is really all to be expected as Murakami was just beginning to find his style. That said, from all the praise I've heard for this novel (it's named in his Wikipedia page as one of his most noteworthy novels), I expected it to be a bit better. It certainly helped me to discover what The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle does so well, and it helped me learn just how much I actually enjoyed reading that book.

That's not to say that A Wild Sheep Chase is not worth reading. If you're a Murakami fan, you'll probably enjoy it. I liked it, even though it was uneven and lacked the polish that his later work features. Murakami has a tendency to run off on tangents, which, at face value, seem as if they'd disrupt the pace and devolve into boring exposition. For example, late in Sheep, Murakami spends a dozen pages describing, in detail, how a village in northern Hokkaido was settled. To summarize: Some dudes migrate as far north as possible to get away from paying debts they owe. They learn to farm with the help of a local Ainu (indigenous peoples of the island), they deal with adversity, start families, etc. It sounds like it'd be boring as all hell, but Murakami's talent as a masterful storyteller somehow allows him to spin such seemingly shoehorned tangent into a compelling piece of the whole. It's one of the things I love about him, and something stands out greatly as a strong feature of his work as a whole. A lot of folks will criticize Murakami's tendency to repeat the same calling cards in each novel (passive male protagonists, lost cats, ear fetishes, psychic women, cooking, jazz and classical music... Do I need to continue?), but these diversions into niche historical storytelling, along with his much more obscure, surreal metaphysical themes, are what make each Murakami novel a new enough experience for me to continue exploring his work. I may not always like how his protagonists lack agency, his characters lack depth, or how his plotting always seems too coincidental and convenient, but I can put up with that stuff to experience what I love about him--even in one of his rougher novels, like this one.

 I've got a trip to southeast Asia involving a couple of 17+ hour flights coming up next week, and I've loaded up on the audiobooks. I'll be listening to Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World over one of these flights, a novel I'm greatly looking forward to, as it is one of the few (including only Kafka on the Shore from his entire oeuvre) that seems to have garnered universal love from among the Murakami faithful.

I'm excited to be through Murakami's training-wheels phase and to start cracking into some of his most well-respected work.

⭐⭐⭐