A Wild Sheep Chase
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  • Published: 24 October 2023
  • ISBN: 9781784878771
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $50.00

A Wild Sheep Chase

Formats & editions
Paperback
3 Aug 2015
Paperback
1 Apr 2003
Hardback
24 Oct 2023
EBook
10 Oct 2011
Audiobook
29 Oct 2020
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A special hardback edition of Murakami's brilliantly surreal, detective-story classic, A Wild Sheep Chase. Published in this new gift edition, with an introduction from the author.

A beautifully packaged hardback edition of Haruki Murakami's brilliantly surreal, detective-story classic, now with a new introduction by the author.

The man was leading an aimless life, time passing, one big blank. His girlfriend has perfectly formed ears, ears with the power to bewitch, marvels of creation. The man receives a letter from a friend, enclosing a seemingly innocent photograph of sheep, and a request: place the photograph somewhere it will be seen.

Then, one September afternoon, the phone rings, and the adventure begins. Welcome to the wild sheep chase.

'Murakami's style and imagination are closer to that of Kurt Vonnegut, Raymond Carver and John Irving' New York Times
  • Published: 24 October 2023
  • ISBN: 9781784878771
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $50.00
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About the author

Haruki Murakami

In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers’ award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, which turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. His books became bestsellers, were translated into many languages, including English, and the door was thrown wide open to Murakami’s unique and addictive fictional universe.

Murakami writes with admirable discipline, producing ten pages a day, after which he runs ten kilometres (he began long-distance running in 1982 and has participated in numerous marathons and races), works on translations, and then reads, listens to records and cooks. His passions colour his non-fiction output, from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running to Absolutely On Music, and they also seep into his novels and short stories, providing quotidian moments in his otherwise freewheeling flights of imaginative inquiry. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84 and Men Without Women, his distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring Murakami’s place as one of the world’s most acclaimed and well-loved writers.

portrait photo of Haruki Murakami

Also by Haruki Murakami

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Vintage Classics Japanese Series)
Dance Dance Dance
Desire
Birthday Girl
South of the Border, West of the Sun
Novelist as a Vocation
The Elephant Vanishes
See all

Praise for A Wild Sheep Chase

A Wild Sheep Chase has the conventional hull of a thriller - a quest, a mystery, an extraordinary woman, and plenty of elegant duress - but its fantastic superstructure transforms it into something quite different...a science fiction fantasy, a romance, a metaphysical tease, or a dramatisation of philosophical ideas

Independent

If you consider yourself an intelligent, sensitive common reader but wish to accommodate something a little removed from your experience, and probably your imagination, I dare you to turn your eyes towards Murakami and head off on a wild sheep chase.

Glasgow Herald

It begins as a detective novel, dips into a screwball comedy, and at its close becomes a tale of possession...A highly accomplished piece of craftsmanship

New Yorker

Wonderfully easy to read and just as wonderfully difficult to make sense of...like the narrator, who slowly accepts the presence in his life of mystery, we slowly recognize the possibility of a new kind of world. Like him, we lean forward and topple headlong into magic

Washington Post

Mr. Murakami's style and imagination are closer to that of Kurt Vonnegut, Raymond Carver and John Irving

New York Times