Week 3: A Wild Sheep Chase

This book was incredibly weird, but it’s easy to see how the important concepts within the novel are expressed using symbolically strange events or objects. The recurrence of an evil sheep seems to align closely with its goal of creating an organized empire over humanity. The way I interpreted this, I think Murakami has a very negative view of large businesses and the way these enormous monopolies seem to brainwash the populace. The term “sheeple” comes to mind. The protagonist often ruminates on the commercialized, industrialized landscape that is slowly replacing the one he used to know. He ends the novel on a positive note by supporting one of the small businesses he loved when he was younger, a jazz bar. It seems because of these elements that Murakami’s main message with the book is really a critique on commercialism. One of the things I didn’t really understand about this novel was the presence and subsequent disappearance of the girl with the special ears. She’s there for the mystery of the novel, the search for Rat’s house on the mountain, but she vanishes as soon as that final location is reached. We get a quick explanation of the fact that she left and lost her ear powers, but I don’t really understand what she was supposed to symbolize in her presence in the novel. Maybe she was just a tool to further the plot, but it seemed like she was doing something important for our protagonist. Still, it was a nice touch to have the protagonist experience the ending of the novel alone except for the ghost of his old friend and the eccentric Sheep Professor. It added an atmosphere of the supernatural to experience that part of the novel by and large alone.