Thoughts on A Wild Sheep Chase

The author of A Wild Sheep Chase Haruki Murakami from Japan. He is famous for his magical realism, and this was the first magical realism book I had ever picked up.

At the beginning it felt a bit surrealist/psychedelic and when I was listening with my full attention instead of passively, I found it to be way more thought provoking.

The plot of this story is relatively standard with some creativity here and there, but it’s all the little crazy Murakami elements that he threw in that made it intriguing.

I put together an unlisted post with my unfiltered notes [here] from the book that reveal a bit about the plot as well as where my brain was moving directly after finishing it. I was all over the place, confused, wishing I understood and paid better attention.

Short snippet from that:

“except he’s showing like ‘look, i’m just an average guy’ and honestly he is — he doesn’t do anything extraordinary at all, just what he has to do and ddoes it on his terms and it works out well for him — doesn’t work out well for other people and maybe that’s also just showing something about life.”

Ultimately

Murakami is saying a lot about society in this book and the way that people work as well as how consciousness works and how we perceive the world. I only got a marginal bit of what that meant/looks like because I didn’t pay enough attention, didn’t process the book with anyone and have zero practice with this type of reading.

Was super thought provoking and fun, though, and Murakami made the story exciting, confusing.

Even now I honestly haven’t given this book the thought and time it deserves, so don’t have a ton more I can say here about what it gave me. A few thoughts:

• There was lots of conversation around names in the book and almost nobody had names — only nicknames, many of which are animals. I think that means it was sort of poking at what it means to have a name, the difference between animals and humans in regards to names and more ideas around that
• On my note from above, there’s something interesting being said about the character’s actions and the sense of inevitability with certain things, all this forshadowing and a bit of a question of how much control we have over our own path
• Murakami is Japanese and I know absolutely nothing about Japan or the culture, so who knows what was tied up in the book in relation to Japan — as the setting was in Japan.

I’m looking forward to the next Murakami I embark on.

Thoughts on this review/the book in general? Comment or send me a note :)

Full reading list here