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Our protagonist’s life has ground to his halt: his wife has divorced him after having an affair, his business is grinding to a halt as the friend with whom he founded it steadily succumbs to alcoholism, and his best friend Rat disappeared years ago – only occasionally sending bizarre, non-sequitur letters containing money or more recently a picture of some sheep.
This picture becomes important, however, because it contains the image of a sheep with the mark of a star – a sheep that is of great interest to the shadowy right-wing organisation that have controlled Japan for years. An organisation that will pay him a great deal of money to find that sheep – or destroy him if he does not.
Spurred on by his new girlfriend and her magical ears, this man with no motivation finds himself on a quest to find a single lost sheep on a mountainside in a country full of mountains. What he finds will make all that seem relatively normal.
What an exceptional book. To start off with it feels like a combination of the surreal humour of Douglas Adam’s Holistic Detective Agency combined with the magical reality of good Rushdie. But this is entirely its own creature. The translation is marvellous and the prose pure poetry – although the author seems to be obsessed with the main characters liquid consumption and expulsion! Plus, the smoking. Never has a book with so many cigarette breaks been so readable.
I’m relatively new to Japanese literature – I’ve only read a dozen or so books (although naturally far more manga and all the Final Fantasy computer games!) – but there does seem to be a certain melancholy that keeps cropping up. Murakami makes the mundane interesting, the simple beautiful, and never lets the sadness drag the book down – far from it, I had to fight the temptation to skip to the last ten pages to find out how things worked out. But it is sad. Some things that are lost are never found. Some things that are found stay lost.
This book does an exquisite job of showing sadness. I can’t wait to read more of his work.
