A Wild Sheep Chase: A Novel (Trilogy of the Rat Book 3)

I have always enjoyed Murakami. His ability to make the ordinary vivid and somehow special is unequalled. Although, how much of that is Murakami and how much his translator's work, I have no idea. Kudos, anyway. So many unimaginable ideas in this one - having one's body invaded and taken over by a sheep, ears that are so beautiful that an entire restaurant of diners is silenced by their appearance, a mountain retreat where time and space seem to stop. And threads woven intricately throughout.

"Me and you, these girls with their certain somethings, we've all got to go sometime." p 286 I am not sure why this quote struck me so vividly. I read a review of this book and a chunk of a paper linking it to Japanese nationalism so I search for deeper meaning in the story. What I see is the inner conflict between individuality and communal work. Using the examples from the book of people who had sheep live in them - they strike me as kind of ultimate individualists... while all along in the book, our hero/narrator is portrayed as 'everyman' in his explicit ordinariness. And, ultimately this ordinariness is what saves him and provides him a place to live. The sheepishness seems to drive people to 'greater things' but ultimately destroys them.

I guess I liked this alright though I'm not crazy about it. The other two books in the Rat series with these characters were not fantasy like this one was so the switch was strange. Though actually, the ending of the book where the fantasy suddenly started was my favorite part of the three books for its discussion of human nature and weakness. Though I'm not certain if the message was that our weaknesses are actually good? Anyway, maybe I was missing something, but it didn't move me much.