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Review by Christina Hardyment, The Times

Haruki Murakami is being fêted with a succession of fine unabridged recordings of his novels by Naxos. [In A Wild Sheep Chase,] the central characters are fashionably nameless and the hero doesn’t know whether he is coming or going. “When I first opened my eyes, it was as if I were living someone else’s life. After an extremely long time, this began to match up with my own life. A curious overlap this, my life as someone else’s. It was improbable that such a person as myself could even be living.” But the intimacy and immediacy of the way the story is read by Rupert Degas carries the listener through the unlikely scenario of an all-knowing intelligence that is incarnate in a sheep with a star on its back, possessing one man after another in order to achieve world domination. What makes this a book for (clever) boys rather than girls is the fate of the women in it, especially one with ears so beautiful that strong men tremble at the sight of them. She is first obsessed over then ignored as the blinkered hero pursues a quest to the snowy wastes of northern Japan.

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Review by Sue Arnold, The Guardian

This was the novel that secured Murakami’s reputation as a cult figure in Japan. If you haven’t read him before, it’s a good one to start with since it contains all the elements that have become his trademarks. Murakami heroes are given to chain-smoking, excessive coffee and beer consumption, self-analysis and despair. They play jazz, wear jeans, love cats and find girls’ ears wildly erotic. Sex without the presence of desirable ears is mere intercourse. ‘I like that word intercourse,’ muses the Wild Sheep narrator. ‘It poses only a limited range of possibilities.’

The plot is surreal and, even by Murakami’s standards, baffling. The nameless narrator (apart from a chauffeur called Kipper and a mysterious absentee called Rat, no one has a name) works for a small Tokyo advertising agency. One afternoon, his new girlfriend, whose ears I will come to presently, announces – they’re lying in bed – that in ten minutes he will get a phone call about sheep and it will be the start of a wild adventure. She’s absolutely right. It’s his business partner; something has come up. The new ad they are planning to run, featuring a photograph of grazing sheep, has to be pulled. Why? If I knew I’d tell you, I really would, but logical explanation for the benefit of puzzled readers is not Murakami’s style. Suffice to say, our hero is dispatched to Hokkaido island in search of a mystical sheep with the same mesmeric capacity to reduce decent, clean-living, intelligent men to spiritual and sexual thraldom as Edward Albee’s goat. Up until now you may not have thought much about the pulling power of sheep, but believe me, after this you will.

The same goes for ears. This is the moment when the narrator asks his new date, who so far seems pretty ordinary, to pull back her hair so that he can see her ears. ‘I swallowed my breath and gazed at her transfixed. “Exquisite,” I managed to squeeze out. “I can’t believe you are the same human being.” Never had I feasted my eyes on such beauty. She was at one with her ears gliding down the oblique face of time like a protean beam of light. “It’s extraordinary,” I said, catching my breath. “I know,” she said. “I want to sleep with you.” So we slept together.’ The real charm of Murakami is that, as well as being original, he is very, very funny.

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