A Wild Sheep Chase

A Wild Sheep Chase (1982) is the third novel by Haruki Murakami, an internationally acclaimed author who most recently won the Jerusalem Prize and whose work has been translated into over 50 languages. He is also known for Norwegian Wood (1987), Kafka on the Shore (2002), and 1Q84 (2009).

The 29-year-old narrator of the novel, who is never named, works for an advertising agency in Tokyo and leads a lonely and regimented life. He is divorced, childless, and has a girlfriend who moonlights as a prostitute, proofreader and ear model. The first part of the novel is relatively realistic, describing the narrator’s fragmented romantic history and rootless urban existence. The novel opens with the narrator’s discovery that a woman with whom he had a casual affair in college—and whose name he cannot recall—has been killed by a passing truck. The novel then jumps ahead in time; the narrator is in the process of splitting up with his wife, for reasons that are never specified. It then jumps ahead two months to describe his present girlfriend, whose ears are mysteriously bewitching to him but who is an unremarkable convenience to him otherwise.