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Title details for A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami - Available

A Wild Sheep Chase

#3 in series

by Haruki Murakami
Rupert Degas
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available

A Wild Sheep Chase is one of Murakami’s most fantastical novels. An advertising executive, infatuated with a girl who possesses the most perfect ears (an erotic charge for him) uses a picture of a sheep with a star on its back. This catapults him into a weird adventure to find the mythical sheep up in the wilds of Hokkaido, Japan’s northern island. There are strange encounters, a hotel with an extra disappearing floor, and other oddities. A Wild Sheep Chase is an early Murakami work, but its remarkable and individual voice makes it one of the most thrilling of his books.

Superbly read by Rupert Degas with an edge of Raymond Chandler.

  • Creators

  • Series

    Trilogy of the Rat

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    May 15, 2007

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9789629546274
      • File size: 276502 KB
      • Duration: 09:36:02

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      In this quirky novel from Japan, the unnamed 30-something narrator goes searching for his hidden friend, The Rat, and a magic sheep seemingly bent on world domination. Part satire, part mystery, the book dwells mostly on the protagonist's ruminations on personalities, events, and milieu. The British audio publisher has cast an American reader. Rupert Degas sounds like a likable East Coast grad student while impersonating the hero, giving the musings and descriptions dramatic and expressive force. In dialogue passages, however, he relies upon his skill with character voices, making them cartoonish. The Rat, for instance, sounds like Woody Allen. This approach seems to clash with the authorial voice, not to mention the Asian setting. Y.R. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      October 1, 1989
      Immensely popular in Japan, the author's first novel to be published here is a comic combination of disparate styles: a mock-hardboiled mystery, a metaphysical speculation and an ironic first-person account of an impossible quest. The narrator is a modern Japanese yuppie: divorced, in a mildly exciting relationship and a much less exciting job as an ad copywriter, he lives unexceptionally until a photograph throws his life into chaos. The snapshot, which he uses to illustrate a newsletter, shows a field of sheep with one unique crossbreed, and the picture is special enough to have attracted the attention of both the nomadic friend who sent it to him and a right-wing Mr. Big who, moribund, wants the source found before he dies. The Boss's henchman, a sleek, scary majordomo, gives the narrator one month to track it down, and the story that ensues is a postmodern detective novel in which dreams, hallucinations and a wild imagination are more important than actual clues. With the help of a fluid, slangy translation, Murakami emerges as a wholly original talent. $30,000 ad/promo; Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternates.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      October 31, 1990
      A Japanese yuppie plunges into chaos after he discovers a snapshot depicting a unique crossbreed of sheep. In ``a comic combination of disparate styles: a mock-hardboiled mystery, a metaphysical speculation and an ironic first-person account of an impossible quest . . . Murakami emerges as a wholly original talent,'' PW wrote.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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