First published 2002
An unnamed narrator drifts through his Tokyo life running a small ad agency, sleeping with a woman whose ears hold an almost supernatural power over anyone who sees them. Then a photograph lands him in serious trouble. He used a sheep image in a routine piece of work, and a shadowy right-wing organization comes knocking, demanding he find the specific animal in that photo or lose everything. The sheep, it turns out, may be more than an animal. Something inside it has been steering powerful men for decades. The narrator and his girlfriend board a train north to Hokkaido, following a trail left by his old friend the Rat, who has gone missing somewhere in the cold backcountry. What begins as a shakedown becomes a genuine search, and the search becomes something stranger still. Murakami pulls the reader through ordinary Tokyo streets and into a landscape where the rules quietly stop applying, and the question at the center is not whether the sheep is real but what a person is willing to risk to find out.
Genres: literary-fiction, mystery, fantasy, contemporary, magical-realism, psychological-thriller
Vibes: dreamlike, introspective, mysterious, philosophical, unsettling
Tropes: found-family, mysterious-woman, quest-narrative, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Tokyo, Hokkaido, Japan
Period: 20th-century, Contemporary
353 pages · Paperback · Vintage