A Wild Sheep Chase

Wonderfully easy to read and just as wonderfully difficult to make sense of…like the narrator, who slowly accepts the presence in his life of mystery, we slowly recognize the possibility of a new kind of world. Like him, we lean forward and topple headlong into magic ― Washington Post

It begins as a detective novel, dips into a screwball comedy, and at its close becomes a tale of possession…A highly accomplished piece of craftsmanship ― New Yorker

Mr. Murakami’s style and imagination are closer to that of Kurt Vonnegut, Raymond Carver and John Irving ― New York Times

A Wild Sheep Chase has the conventional hull of a thriller – a quest, a mystery, an extraordinary woman, and plenty of elegant duress – but its fantastic superstructure transforms it into something quite different…a science fiction fantasy, a romance, a metaphysical tease, or a dramatisation of philosophical ideas ― Independent

If you consider yourself an intelligent, sensitive common reader but wish to accommodate something a little removed from your experience, and probably your imagination, I dare you to turn your eyes towards Murakami and head off on a wild sheep chase. ― Glasgow Herald

In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers’ award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, that turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon.