A Wild Sheep Chase
A Wild Sheep Chase is Haruki Murakami's third novel, originally published in Japanese in 1982 as Hitsuji o Meguru Boken and translated into English by Alfred Birnbaum in 1989, the book that introduced Murakami to most English-language readers. It is the third volume of his loose Trilogy of the Rat sequence, after Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973. The unnamed narrator is a thirty-year-old Tokyo advertising copywriter newly divorced and quietly drifting. He is partner in a small ad agency with an old college friend known only as the Rat. One afternoon he runs an innocuous PR pamphlet that includes a stock photograph of a flock of sheep in a Hokkaido pasture. Days later he is summoned by a sinister chauffeur to the deathbed mansion of an old right-wing power broker, who informs him that one of the sheep in the photograph is no ordinary animal, and that he has one month to find it or his agency, his life, and his friends will be quietly ruined. He sets off for Hokkaido.
Themes & atmosphere
Also by Haruki Murakami
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What you might want to know about A Wild Sheep Chase
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A Tokyo ad man uses a strange photograph in a brochure and is summoned by a sinister fixer who orders him to find one specific sheep. The trail leads north, and then somewhere stranger.
A Wild Sheep Chase was written by Haruki Murakami, originally published in Japanese in 1982 and translated into English in 1989. It is the third novel in the loose Trilogy of the Rat.
A Wild Sheep Chase can be read on its own, but the unnamed narrator and his friend the Rat appear in two earlier novels, Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973. Some readers prefer to start with those for context, while many start with A Wild Sheep Chase since it was his first major international success.
A Wild Sheep Chase is a standalone novel by Haruki Murakami, not part of a series.
A Wild Sheep Chase is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.