WEEK THREE: A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami (6)

  Haruki Murakami creates these weird worlds where nothing should make sense and he does not even put an effort to explain or make things ordinary. In A Wild Sheep Chase the characters do not have names and the protagonist tells the story in first person narration. However, the characters have interesting nicknames that I think play a bigger role in describing them than just names such as “the girl who’d sleep with anyone.” While reading the book I had this weird feeling that was hard to explain but made me go a few years back when I was reading Murakami’s Kafka On The Shore. I guess all his books share the same energy and it is in the words. The way he describes morning and how tasteless everything seems because of the morning sun evokes hazy feelings. 

Back to weirdness, the ears being the center of attention, a part of the body that is usually neglected as people mostly pay attention to the eyes, nose and mouth. We never heard somebody say “your ears are so beautiful” and making the audience look at the ears is so unique of a choice. She has these magical ears that tell her things and she can block them too. Another thing that caught my attention is the way the narrator describes himself, he describes himself as ordinary but if you try and ask five people to tell about themselves they will not do the way he did. We do not really tell how many suits we own or how many cigarettes we smoke a day and this introduction made me think of the ways I introduce myself.  

The sheep. The sheep is a weird character, it is there but it is not, technically a ghost. The sheep is allegory to the negative but through the book we do not really figure out what exactly it represents. We are first introduced to the sheep from the advertisement, well, before that the ears tell the girl about the phone call regarding the sheep and then the protagonist’s partner and then the narrator is destined to find it, then we know that the sheep is somehow connected to the Sensei. However, nobody has ever heard of that sheep. In my opinion, the journey protagonist took made him realize who he actually is and maybe feel less ordinary.