A Wild Sheep Chase (Penguin International Writers) - Softcover

Murakami, Haruki

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140132759 ISBN 13: 9780140132755

Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd, 1993

Synopsis

"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. It is superbly read by Rupert Degas with an edge of Raymond Chandler.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

A marvelous hybrid of mythology and mystery, A Wild Sheep Chase" is the extraordinary literary thriller that launched Haruki Murakami's international reputation.
It begins simply enough: A twenty-something advertising executive receives a postcard from a friend, and casually appropriates the image for an insurance company's advertisement. What he doesn't realize is that included in the pastoral 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 in black who offers a menacing ultimatum: find the sheep or face dire consequences. Thus begins a surreal and elaborate quest that takes our hero from the urban haunts of Tokyo to the remote and snowy mountains of northern Japan, where he confronts not only the mythological sheep, but the confines of tradition and the demons deep within himself. Quirky and utterly captivating, A Wild Sheep Chase is Murakami at his astounding best.

From the Back Cover:

“Murakami is a mythmaker for the millennium, a wiseacre wiseman.” –New York Times Book Review

"A delight . . . equal parts screwball comedy, detective story, and heroic quest." –USA Today
“A witty adventure . . . a piece of verbal anarchy . . . a labyrinthine mystery from start to finish.” –San Francisco Chronicle

"Marvelously engaging, at turns witty, dry, wicked, even loopy. Reading A Wild Sheep Chase is like spending a splendidly foul weekend with the Four Raymonds–Chandler, Carver, Massey, and Queneau."–Frederick Barthelme

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0140132759
• ISBN 13: 9780140132755
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 1