I just finished this book. I really don’t know if I understood this fully. Before I read the reviews and get myself influenced by the thoughts and views of others, I decided to pen down what I feel as I change the status of this book from currently reading to read on Goodreads.
Haruki Murakami was a stranger to me till the last week of December 2015. I had seen posts of his books tagged #Murakami on Instagram before but never thought of giving it a try until a couple of my friends (if I could call them so, at least) on the same platform announced a reading marathon scheduled for the third and fourth weeks of January 2016, titled #MurakamiMadness and invited their followers to join them. Me being one of their followers, took up this opportunity to know who Murakami is and expressed my interest to join them. Logging into Amazon.co.in, searching Murakami, browsing through his books and picking A Wild Sheep Chase, though I don’t find any particular reason for that, everything happened in the blink of an eye, but not literally. Everything takes it’s own time. The book was finally delivered to me by the first week of January, making it my first buy of 2016.
There goes the flashback. Coming back to the present, let me write something about the book now. The very first I noticed as I picked up the book was it’s cover. It took some time for me to interpret the red black and white coloured theme and interpret the white half face and black horn of a sheep against a red circular background. The cover is well designed and it is catchy.
It will definitely sound boring if I start now with the usual the story begins with thing. I have no intentions to write about the story or the what ifs or the author’s style. Other than the cover design, the characters are uniquely shaped up as none of them possess an identity called name. The narrator is nameless, so is his ex wife, girlfriend, partner and every single character other than the narrator’s friend, The Rat. The book is even listed as the last part of Murakami’s Rat Trilogy and i definitely have to read the other two works to figure out what exactly this Rat series is all about. Given my tight academic schedule and the long list of books already in my to be read list, it’s indeed going to take a pretty long time, I guess. The Sheep Professor and Sheep Man are two other significant characters in the book.
The book started off as a murder mystery, introduced us to the characters and took a slow pace in establishing the storyline and often left me confused how the story would end. No clues were left to pick up his true intention as we move from the narrator’s failed marriage to his alcoholic business partner and then to the girlfriend. The way the author thinks of his wife, reasons for them falling apart and her new partner could be easily related to the way I think of the persons who are very much alive, but not in my life anymore.
As the name suggests, the book is about a sheep chase. How an advertising executive with an aimless life gets caught in with the sheep myth and leads the chase forms the crux of the story. For me, the sheep was symbolic of life itself. There are characters in the story who had failed after leaving behind everything they had in search of a better life and their experiences influence the narrator in a way he could never even dream of. People who had read this book, if they happen to read this will have views which may or may not disagree with this concept. Even I am pretty sure that it is too early to draw conclusions as I have to cut down the gap between me and Murakami with multiple readings of this book.
If this book happened to be published in India in recent times, I am sure it would be made mandatory to fix the warning “Smoking Kills” on the cover design as almost every single character of the story smokes, many of them, including the narrator himself being a chain smoker. I often felt that cigarette was one of the basic necessity of the characters along with beer, brandy and whiskey and what not.
As I mentioned earlier, the book definitely calls for, if not multiple readings, at least a second reading for sure. I hope I can come up with something better than this then. Till then, this is it.
