"She’d become so beautiful, it defied understanding. Never had I feasted my eyes on such beauty. It transcended all concepts within the boundaries of my awareness. She was at one with her ears, gliding down the oblique face of time like a protean beam of light.
"You are extraordinary." I said after catching my breath.
"I know." she said. 'These are my ears in their unblocked state."
I get to say that I was reading Murakami before he became so wildly popular in the US. This was the first book of his that I read, sometime back in the early 90's. As I recall, I was trying to find Hard Boiled Wonderland at the library, but this was available instead. But this was good enough to get me hooked.
Describing a Murakami novel is always a challenge - both in terms of plot and exactly how to categorize it. Japanese magical realism, topped with a love of American detective fiction and fueled with a skepticism of modern Japanese society? There is something that runs through all his work along those lines. A Wild Sheep Chase has a more straightforward plot than a lot of his later work, not that it makes a lot of sense.
Our hero, who like many an early Murakami protagonist, is never named. He's divorced and runs an ad agency with a friend. Pretty typical Murakami guy - not particularly motivated, mostly just passing through life. He gets a letter from an old friend, "the Rat," whom he has not seen in years. It includes a photo that our hero uses in a magazine advertisement as a background. Because of this he is contacted by associates of "the Boss," a shadowy influential political figure. It seems that the photo includes a special sheep (identified by a star shaped mark on its back) that has supernatural power and this sheep has provided the Boss his power. He needs the sheep back to maintain his influence, and possibly his life. Our hero, along with his girlfriend with the alluring ears (another Murakami special) seek out the Rat.
The physical journey is less important than the mental (metaphysical?) one. They end up in the mountains of Japan at an abandoned farmhouse with seemingly little to do until an odd man dressed as a sheep turns up. I generally find it next to impossible to say what a Murakami novel is about, though undeniably there is a lot to be gained. The closest I can come is to say his books allow you to appreciate your own world in a different perspective than you normally do. Maybe we all need to allow our ears to be unblocked from time to time.
