A Wild Sheep Chase, Haruki Murakami, Kodansha International, 1989
Set in present day Japan, this is the story of an average man, part of a small publishing/translating business, who meets, and falls for, a woman with absolutely perfect ears, the sort of ears that make people stop and stare. One day, he is visited by a man with beautiful hands, an aide to a shadowy right-wing politician dying from a golf-ball sized cyst in his brain. With only the help of a 50-year-old photo, the narrator's assignment is to find one particular sheep, a sheep with the shape of a star on its back and very clear eyes. The narrator, never identified by name, doesn't have a choice; find the sheep, or be blacklisted for the rest of his life. The narrator and his girlfriend, the one with the perfect ears, set off from Tokyo and end up in the mountains of Hokkaido, with winter coming.
This is a really interesting, and easy to read, novel that gets increasingly strange as it progresses. By the end, the reader certainly learns a lot about sheep in Japan. For those who like their fiction with a touch of weird, Haruki Murakami is highly recommended, and this book is no exception.
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