‘That September afternoon towards summer’s end, I took the day off and was lying in bed with her, stroking her hair and thinking about the whale’s penis.’ (A Wild Sheep Chase, p 41)
Thirty-seven question marks. That’s how many I scribbled on the pages of this novel. Thirty-seven is a lot for a three-hundred page book and yet there could’ve been more had I not given up mid-way and accepted my confusion. Beyond the question marks, my notes are peppered with jottings of ‘bizarre’ and ‘whaaa?’ and ‘so strange’. I read some paragraphs four times and they still didn’t click.
In short, I didn’t like this novel. Big chunks of it just didn’t make sense. Do they have to? For me, ideally, yes. Or the unclarity should have an inherent balance within the novel that makes me accept it. Otherwise as a reader, I get the sense that I’m not being taken seriously. Or that I’m dumb. Neither of which are easy to accept. Still, that doesn’t make this a bad novel, or one not worth reading. In fact, that’s what I’ll try to convince you in this piece. But before we get to the meat of it, relativism in reading, let me briefly cover what the novel is about, where it worked for me and where it didn’t.
What the book is about
A Wild Sheep Chase is Murakami’s third novel and the last in the Trilogy of the Rat, after Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 (more on these two here). With this one, Murakami decided to put on his big-boy pants and take on writing as a full-time job. In What We Talk About When We Talk About Running, his memoir, Murakami explains how he agreed with his wife to sell the bar they owned for him to focus on writing for two years. If things didn’t work out, he claimed, he could always open a bar once again. In those two years, he wrote this book.
A Wild Sheep Chase is a quest novel written in a very Murakami style. It’s part mystery, part magical realism with a modern twist. The protagonist is the same nameless character from the previous two novels, ‘I’. He’s 29 now, lives in Tokyo, he’s divorced and has a girlfriend who works as a prostitute, proofreader and ear model. Her ears are beyond beautiful and allegedly magical.
The story really starts when a mysterious man visits the ad agency where ‘I’ works and asks him to find a sheep that is pictured in one of their ads. The sheep is special: if it gets ‘into’ you, it will use your body and spirit to build an empire aimed at world domination. It follows that some people desire the sheep as much as others want to keep away from it. Our protagonist has one month to find it or his life is ruined. At first he doesn’t want to go find the sheep, then he does, dragging after him the woman with the great ears. They travel to Hokkaido where the sheep was last seen. Things happen. The Sheep Man appears, the Rat appears, some people disappear, and at the end, unsurprisingly, he ‘sort of’ finds the sheep. The plot doesn’t get significantly clearer than this summary even if you read the book, but for a better synopsis you can go here.
What I liked
More plot. Good jokes. 3D Glasses
In this novel, more so than in the previous two, things actually ‘happen’. The action flows from one event to the other and there is more of a coherent story. There’s also an actual ending that triggers a sense of resolution and brings back the reader to a low-tension point. Despite not answering all the questions, the last chapter closes with an act of generosity and ‘I’ being content, which left me feeling clean and at ease.
A Wild Sheep Chase is also humorous to an extent to which few other Murakami novels are. Here are some golden lines that made me chuckle:
‘I was about to speak when the maître d’hôtel advanced on our table. He showed me the wine label, all smiles as if showing me a photo of his only son.’ (p 31)
or
‘His body odour permeated the entire room. No, I would hesitate to call it body odour. Beyond a certain point, it ceased to be body odour and blended into time, merged with the light.’ (p 184)
Last but not least, this edition came with 3D glasses and a 3D cover. If you put on the glasses, the black and white sheep on the cover comes at you through a vortex. Not too bad.
What I didn’t like
Too slow. Too many inconsistencies. Too weird.
In the few instances where Murakami described his style, he claimed he starts writing without a plan and goes wherever the story takes him. With this novel, we’re witnessing the creative process end to end. A Wild Sheep Chase is like a large frame that contains to one side the actual painting, while the rest of the space is taken by all sketches the artist made to find the subject of the story and warm up for telling it. Some narrative threads start, and others die off and you never know which ones are likely to develop into the core story of the novel. While it’s refreshing, it can quickly become frustrating.
For example, the novel starts with one coherent narrative thread - the protagonist goes to the funeral of a girl he used to date - which is then dropped and never mentioned again. It’s like Murakami introduced the main character and tested him off on a separate short story before starting the main story. This way, if you cut the first 40 pages of the novel you lose nothing apart from the brilliant quote at the top of this essay about the whale’s penis. In fact, you might be able to cut more: the actual ‘sheep quest’ only begins at page 150 out of 300. Imagine the Titanic kicking off with how the ship was built or Leonardo Di Caprio grocery shopping for fifteen minutes before boarding. That’s not the story the movie is trying to tell. Similarly here, having a long, irrelevant beginning just dilutes the effect of the book.
Then there are a few inconsistencies, but there’s no way I could write about them without turning this essay into a complete spoiler. Somehow, the novel feels like it didn’t go through multiple drafts. Details that are presented at the start of the book contradict what is shown or said later on. I won’t go into detail - just take my word for it here.
But overall, what didn’t work for me was the sheer weirdness of the novel. One of the reasons why I enjoy reading Murakami is because he is experimental. In this novel though, I spent a lot of time being confused. And not in a good way. Take the ears of the girlfriend that have nothing to do with the story. Or how she is an instrument in the plot, popping up at the right time with the right comment, then made to disappear. Or the strange similes that are peppered through the novel, such as ‘The car raced to the airport like a salmon shooting upstream to spawn’ (p 153). Or how Murakami gets philosophical at times, but in such an abstract way that it’s disorienting, cryptic and lacking clear value. And above all, the fact that the main character wants nothing. That’s not particularly strange as Murakami’s characters rarely desire much, but this guy really isn’t moved by anything to an extent to which he is more of a vessel for the plot than a driver of it. Basically, of all the Murakami novels I read to date, this one I enjoyed the least. Sorry, Haruki.
What do others think?
I was surprised to read the Washington Post quote on the back cover of the novel. It said: ‘Lean forward and topple headlong into magic’. At first I judged it as publishing BS, but then I read more about the book and saw that it won a big award in Japan at the time1 and was one of the first Murakami books to be internationally recognized2. Then I read some online reviews from other readers. I was surprised. Turns out, lots of people actually loved this novel. Some of them definitely saw something in the sheep chase. Where I thought the protagonist had no driving force in life, they read the story as a ‘search’, as ‘I’ going on a journey to find himself. And where I got bored, they got enthusiastic. Like this lady:
‘At times it's all wheeeeeeeee and then it's ooooof, then more wheeeeee and ooooooof with some whooooaaaa and woooohoooo, put your hands up and submit to the fun of structured chaos.’
Or this guy
‘I didn’t understand all of this book but I loved all of it.’
Others sounded a bit more like me
‘If there is an underlying meaning to this book, I can’t tell you what the heck it is.’
and
‘The whole thing washed over me without leaving much of an impression at all’
Then this one hit the nail on the head:
‘Trying to rationalize everything you read in this book won't work, so don't waste your time. You should rather let your inner eye read this amazing story about sheep.’
What is subjective reading?
All in all, this dissonance in opinions brings into question the intrinsic value of a novel. What do we deem valuable? Is there a hierarchy of value in art? How is it possible that every person experiences the same thing in their own way and derives such different levels of satisfaction from it?
The ‘value’ of a novel is difficult to assess. I’d rather stay away from transparent, yet highly debatable metrics like Goodreads scores or Facebook likes. If anything, these indicators tell you what the majority thinks, but they are by no means a sign of quality and even less so a promise that you’ll enjoy a certain read. Think of the many movies which are dull and yet bring hordes of people in cinemas, watching yet another explosion or car chase.
Instead, I believe people judge books through a personal filter that’s formed of their own values and identity. Certain stories may resonate with us because the characters or the voice of the author strike a familiar chord, they touch on something deeply personal. The same way we are different people, we are also different readers. Some may be more comfortable with the abstract, with the lack of clarity and as one reader said, ‘ok with not expecting to get everything’, while others want to delve deep, turn every stone and study it.
Turns out this is coined in literary criticism as the reader-response theory. In short, the theory recognizes the reader as an active agent who imparts ‘real existence’ to the work and completes its meaning through interpretation. It’s a way of seeing literature as a performing art where each reader creates their own, unique, text-related performance, by playing it through a personal filter of emotions, knowledge, and cultural constraints. An effective simile is that of two people gazing at the sky and seeing the same collection of stars, yet one recognizing the image of a plough and the other of a bird3. The stars, like the literary text, are the same. The people who connect them are different.
This explain why we sometimes read ‘great’ books but fail to get what’s so ‘great’ about them. We are most stimulated by the type of writing that connects with our emotions and imagination and which speaks to who we are as individuals and members of a community. In turn, some reads need us to be ‘ready’, to have accumulated the necessary life experience before they can open themselves up. In that sense, discovering what works for each of us is a deeply personal search and reading soon starts to resemble dating: likely to disappoint or impress when we least expect it. There’s little to do apart from keeping at it, hoping that the right book will come along.
In my case, I couldn’t really fall for Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (Man Booker Prize 2004) or Colson Whitehead’s Nickel Boys (Pulitzer Prize 2020) or Paul Beatty’s The Sellout (Man Booker Prize 2016). Even though reading literature is meant to increase empathy, to make you feel what others feel, a white Eastern European guy can only feel so much of how it is to be black and abused in a reform school from a century past (Nickel Boys setting) or to be a young gay man in London’s high society (The Line of Beauty). I can put myself in the shoes of the protagonist, or extrapolate their story to my own experiences, but I am blind to the full complexity of their world regardless of the writer’s skill. In short, I can tell why the novel is alright, but not why it’s brilliant.
Relativism suggests there’s no ultimate measure of quality, which also renders the idea of book recommendations virtually useless. Unless you know someone really well, it’s hard to suggest a novel you can even remotely trust they’ll enjoy reading. If anything, the books we like might tell us more about the people we are than about the books themselves or somebody else’s potential to appreciate them. So, in the end, don’t listen to me. Go ahead and read A Wild Sheep Chase yourself. Maybe it works for you. I’ll just move on to the next Murakami novel in the meantime.
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Note: Page references are based on the 2015 Vintage Classics Special 3D edition.
1982 Noma Literary Newcomer's Prize
https://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/21/books/books-of-the-times-young-and-slangy-mix-of-the-us-and-japan.html
Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 282