Haruki Murakami

Quirky and utterly captivating, A Wild Sheep Chase is Murakami at his astounding best. An advertising executive receives a postcard from a friend and casually appropriates the image for an advertisement. What he doesn’t realize is that included in the scene is a mutant sheep with a star on its back, and in using this photo he has unwittingly captured the attention of a man who offers a menacing ultimatum: find the sheep or face dire consequences. Thus begins a surreal and elaborate quest that takes readers from Tokyo to the remote mountains of northern Japan, where the unnamed protagonist has a surprising confrontation with his demons.

A Novel

A Wild Sheep Chase

Alina

Now all I know about her is my memories of her. And these memories fade further and further into the distance like displaced cells.

I skipped the thirty-one years between 1938 and 1969 and jumped to the section entitled “Junitaki Today.” Of course, the book’s “today” being 1970, it was hardly today’s “today.” Still, writing the history of one town obviously imposed the necessity of bringing it up to a “today.” And even if such a today soon ceases to be today, no one can deny that it is in fact a today. For if a today ceased to be today, history could not exist as history.

Whether you take the doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit.

One of these days they'll be making a film where the whole human race gets wiped out in a nuclear war, but everything works out in the end.

What a poignant way to describe the silence after the click of the turntable… Beautiful 

The record ended, the needle lifted, and all was silence. The sort of silence that follows in the wake of the death of all living things.

Nica

“There’s no telling every last thing about someone’s life, no matter how boring.”

40 pages later, were finally starting the book ok

"There's no honest work anywhere. Just like there's no honest breathing or honest pissing."

"You were more innocent in the old days."

"Maybe so," I said, crushing out a cigarette in the ashtray. "And no doubt there's an innocent town somewhere where an innocent butcher slices innocent ham. So if you think that drinking whiskey from the middle of the morning is innocent, go ahead and drink as much as you want."

We can in the same breath deny that there is any such thing as coincidence. What’s done is done, what’s yet to be is clearly yet to be, and so on. In other words, sandwiched as we are between the “everything” that is behind us and the “zero” beyond us, ours is an ephemeral existence in which there is neither coincidence nor possibility.

In actual practice, however, distinctions between the two interpretations amount to precious little.

So now, I'm twenty-nine, turning thirty in another nine months.

I still don't know whether I'm cut out for this kind of life or not. I don't know if there's something universal about wanting to be a drifter. But as somebody once wrote somewhere, you need one of three things for a long life of wandering—a religious temperament, or an artistic temperament, or a psychic temperament. If you have one but only on the short side, an extended drifter's existence is out of the question. In my case, I can't see myself with any of them. In a pinch, I might say ... no, better not.

Otherwise. I might end up opening the wrong door some day, only to find I can't back out. Whatever, if the door's been opened, I better make a go of it.

A Wild Sheep Chase quotes

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