Week 3 - A Wild Sheep Chase

A Wild Sheep Chase

I really enjoyed Haruki Murakami's writing in A Wild Sheep Chase this week. I felt his use of metaphor and contemplative monologuing might have felt a bit too heavy-handed in a more grounded genre, but the dreamy, subtly supernatural nature of the book balanced it out well for me. A Wild Sheep Chase also surprised me because it didn't feel like horror at all. It seemed a lot more like a very existential detective-noir mystery with some supernatural aspects rather than anything I'd expect from the horror genre, especially given the Japanese horror conventions I have seen in film. The overall attitude of the book reminded me a lot of The Stranger by Albert Camus, especially given the protagonist's self-described mediocrity and halfhearted search for something more in his life. It definitely felt like an interesting, very unexpected twist of a
book.