Sheep and Sexy Ears

        I was originally going to bail on the book this week and read the short stories instead but I read a few pages of the legends and was kind of thinking “eh” and then I read the back of “A Wild Sheep Chase” and immediately fell in love. Maybe it was the ears.

        What I really liked about this book was the small things. For example, I liked the fact that no one had a name. I didn't realize it at first and then I realized that the narrator, his pretty-eared girlfriend, and the other characters were either given nicknames such as the “The Rat” or “The Boss”. I've had a lot of nameless characters in my own writing and I find it to be rather nice because then it's not just “George” its “Man” and it's sort of cutting the character down to the root without any extra bells or whistles. And as Murakami noted "Herring swim around on their own will but nobody gives them names". People are people and nothing more or less.  Also, the characters themselves were so distinctive that I think it was impossible to confuse them. Who could confuse an extremely sexy-eared call girl with your ex wife who divorced you because you life was going nowhere?

        I liked the role that women played in this book. It seemed they possessed some sort of spiritual knowledge that the narrator lacked. For example, his dead ex girlfriend in the beginning was only off by a year when she predicted the age she would die. His pretty eared girlfriend even predicts the phone call about “lots of sheep and one sheep in particular” (49). She also seemed to have the sixth sense about which hotel they should stay in that would eventually lead them down the road to the sheep they were looking for. Without the aid of his girlfriend, the narrator wouldn't even gotten near the location of the sheep. This brings the matter of the quest itself, following a man who's basically coming and going nowhere in his life. This Nowhere Man is stuck on a random journey to find this sheep and it turns into a random fallout of events which I can only seem to grasp another search for the holy grail, but this time its a magical sheep.

         I think the sheep itself was kind of like the Moby Dick of this book. Everyone was looking for it, everyone wanted to harness its power or rather, be harnessed by its power. In the end it was all related in an odd sort of way, kind of like when you have a dream and everything falls together and then you wake up and you have that lingering feeling but the reason is gone. There was the constant thinking back to the whale penis, which again points back to Moby Dick, as well as the Dolphin Hotel which was going to originally be named Whale Hotel. In a sense, the narrator is the Ishmael of this book he's the last one left, with his friend the Rat dead, girlfriend gone, job gone, and nowhere to go. I think this really reflected on the book as a whole, about loss of self and loss of ideals.