Este libro me aburrió muchísimo. Podría haber sido más corto, y con corto me refiero a la mitad de su extensión. Hay bastantes capítulos que sobran completamente, que no afectan en absoluto a la trama. Encima esas partes no están dedicadas a las reflexiones tan características de Murakami, sino que consisten en un seguimiento tedioso de actividades anodinas del protagonista.

Otra cosa que no me gustó fue que los personajes de las dos entregas anteriores de esta saga hayan cambiado tanto. Dejaron de ser tan atractivos. No lograron captar mi interés como en Pinball, 1973 y Escucha la canción del viento.

El final considero que salvó un poco a La caza del carnero salvaje. Pero solo un poco. No me pareció nada extraordinario, no obstante, teniendo en cuenta el lento y largo desarrollo que venía leyendo, fue una especie de alivio. En suma, me gustó, y, junto con la prosa de Murakami, es la razón por que le doy dos estrellas a este libro.

This book was trash lol

"We are not whales- and this constitutes one great theme underscoring our sex life." ????????

"It came back to me, that giant whale's penis, after having intercourse with a girl for the very first time... but I was only seventeen... it was then and there I came to the realisation... which is, that I am not a whale" ???????? lol what?????

"An "earholder", someone with ears" aka a person? a woman? godforbid you actually write a female character with depth.. yes just call them an earholder.

"I am my ears, my ears are me" lol ok

"I'll stretch my legs and find a woman"
"...finding women has never been much of a problem for me"
"sex appeal's easy, not a problem"
"I lose track of where I myself stop and my sex appeal begins" same tbh

"My wife hadn't come home in four days. Her toothbrush by the wash basin was caked and cracked like a fossil." lol I'm sorrY whAT happens to a toothbrush that hasn't been used for FOUR days?

"If not for the sharp curve of his eyelids and the glass-bead chills of his pupils, I would surely have thought him homosexual" ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

"women with their clothes off have a frightening similarity" yea so trash writer & sexist

Dare I say it… not one of Haruki Murakami's best work, although his almost hypnotic poetic writing style still reigns. Simply, and literally a wild sheep chase down the road of magical realism… from detective story, through dark comedy to a a supernatural tale… only Murakami would even think of this! And a final point, before adding this review to Goodreads, I had no inkling it was the third book in a series! 4 out of 12.

Cada encuentro con Murakami es un viaje único y especial. Lo peculiar de sus historias no son, quizás, para todos los gustos, pero si le pillas el punto, pocos te harán disfrutar tanto como él.

Nos encontrarmos con el protagonista de Escucha la canción del viento y Pinball 1973 varios años después. En la actualidad, está a punto de divorciarse y es socio de una empresa de publicidad junto con un amigo. La publicación de una extraña fotografía en la que aparecen un rebaño de ovejas, provocará una serie de disparatadas y extrañas situaciones.

Cuando me sumergo en una historia de Murakami, sé de antemano que me voy a encontrar con una de sus dos vertientes. Puede ser la más sencilla, con historias cotidianas del día a día y las relaciones humanas que se dan entre un grupo de personas. O bien, todo lo anterior mezclado con mundos parelelos, surrealismo y mucho suspense. La caza del carnero salvaje se enmarca en esta última tendencia. Un personaje solitario, que no encuentra su lugar en el mundo, de pronto sentirá un renovado interés en la vida a raíz de una extraña intriga que tiene que ver con un carnero.

Cuanto más leo a Murakami, más reafirmo la razón de que sea mi autor favorito. Sus libros son viajes que no siempre responden cuestiones, sino que las plantean. Y siempre me absorven completamtente. Es hipnótico este señor.

El final de la novela, como casi siempre me suele pasar con él, me deja esa extraña sensación de vacío que sienten sus personajes durante toda la historia. Si te gustan la historias de personajes solitarios que buscan su lugar en el mundo, sin sentir que encajen del todo, Murakami es tu autor.

Tercera parte de la tetralogía de "El Rata" y, probablemente, uno de los libros más extraños de Murakami. El estilo, enmarcado dentro del más puro surrealismo, no tiene nada que ver con las dos novelas anteriores de la saga, que son de corte realista (recopiladas en español en un solo tomo). Así es este autor, cada libro suyo es una sorpresa, una aventura, porque o bien escribe dentro del realismo, o bien dentro del surrealismo más descabellado. Creo que es una de las cosas que hace que mucha gente lo ame o lo odie sin término medio, porque cuando le da por el surrealismo, es bizarro de verdad. Yo, por mi parte, lo adoro y le leería hasta la lista de la compra, aunque solo comprase comida para el gato.

Nos encontramos en esta novela al protagonista de las dos anteriores, unos cinco años después de la segunda parte. A punto de cumplir los treinta y recién divorciado, se ve envuelto en una extraña misión, encargada por uno de los grupos de presión más influyentes de Japón: le dan dos meses para viajar a Hokkaidō y encontrar a un carnero que se supone que no existe. Por supuesto, esto conforma el misterio del libro.

Dicen que esta tetralogía se puede leer sin orden cronológico, pero a mí me está resultando más divertido el proceso respetando este orden. Esta novela en concreto creo que no la habría disfrutado igual de no haber leído las dos anteriores, y también me habría perdido muchas cosas. De hecho, si hubiera empezado por este libro a leer las novelas de “El Rata”, creo que no habría entendido gran cosa. Si ya en la primera mitad, conociendo a los personajes y las particularidades del surrealismo de Murakami, me pregunté varias veces a qué demonios me estaba enfrentando, no quiero pensar cómo habría sido ir a ciegas con este libro.

Es que es una novela muy extraña en su narrativa y su forma, y reconozco que al principio me costaba cogerle un poco el ritmo, pero una vez familiarizada, la lectura fue rodada. Es un libro que invita mucho a reflexionar, que se pone filosófico con el sentido de la vida; se detiene a pensar en el pasado y en la soledad, en la amistad y en las relaciones disfuncionales, en las pequeñas cosas, pero también es un libro que me ha hecho reír en muchos momentos gracias a su ironía (y al gato Sardina), y que tiene grandes dosis de misterio.

Lo he disfrutado mucho, me encanta cómo escribe Murakami y en este libro en particular se marca unas descripciones del Japón otoñal que me han traído recuerdos muy bonitos de mi estancia en este país. Además, como curiosidad, leí las dos primeras partes de la tetralogía estando en Japón, así que en lo personal y por asociación, retomar las peripecias del Rata y compañía me ha evocado grandes momentos de mi vida.

En fin, que Murakami es de esos autores a quienes no puedo dejar de agradecer que un día cualquiera decidieran empezar a escribir.

Vẫn mô típ cũ: 1 thằng cha nuôi mèo, không người thân, bỏ việc, bỏ cả vợ (hoặc bị vợ bỏ) - bỏ bình thường êm xuôi thôi, ko đánh ghen lột đồ hay lôi nhau ra tòa chia chác nghìn tỷ

Our hand-reared cockatiel is on borrowed time if she continues to peck lumps off the books on my Murakami shelf. Clearly, she likes his books as well (but for different reasons than me). She moved from 1Q84 (unread), to this book, as the little bite marks attest.

Vacuum the paper trail. Breathe. Ahhhhhhhhh.

Oh my goodness, every time I read this man I swoon with admiration. There’s something extremely comforting for me, knowing I’m in the hands of a masterful technician of the written word like Murakami. The crazy loon stuff he writes could really backfire in the hands of some writers.

Witness here: sheep angling for a supreme power base, over humans; a girlfriend whose ears, when exposed, increase sexual pleasure to such an extent that you wish you could reach into this nutty world and retrieve a boxful of them; a Mafioso type boss, who (via his strange secretary) insists the protagonist, Boku, find a mysterious lone sheep with a star on its back, despite having not a lead in the world to go on; the sheep professor, just a tad obsessive you’d say, near buried in everything ever written with a whiff of the ovine about it; the sheep man (hitsuji-otoko), a depressive, apparently ‘clothed’ in a suit, yet through which extrudes two horns; a chauffeur who casually offers up the phone number of God (yet doesn’t appear in the slightest bit delusional when he says he speaks to him on the phone, nightly); and a friend called rat who instigates the sheep hunt (indirectly), yet is actually dead. Sheep extravaganza. It’s all whacky, yet it carries the illusion of truth. That’s the art. Murakami makes you believe him, and this is why it works.

After I wrote this, I looked up what Jay Rubin (one of his translators) had to say about the book, in
Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words. He quotes Murakami, who for the first time in his career, had researched his subject, traveling Japan, immersing himself in all things sheep (so to speak):

'As I wrote A Wild Sheep Chase I came to feel strongly that a story, a monogatari, is not something you create. It is something that you pull out of yourself. The story is already there, inside you. You can’t make it, you can only bring it out. This is true for me, at least: it is the story’s spontaneity. For me, a story is a vehicle that takes the reader somewhere. Whatever information you may try to convey, whatever you may try to open the reader’s emotions to, the first thing you have to do is get them in the vehicle. And the vehicle – the story – the monogatari – must have the power to make people believe. These above all are the conditions that a story must fulfil'.

You might say he’s successfully loaded us into the vehicle. What’s more, we just learnt the Japanese word for story.

There are just so many things that I’m captivated by in Murakami’s books - in this novel as much as his others that I’ve read - that I don’t know where to begin. His work warrants PhD level analysis, and I recently downloaded one, I’m that intrigued by him. Understandably, he is a frequent on many University syllabuses, including mine.

His characters are living, breathing, eating, travelling, sexual beings, he infuses so much movement into them; one of the pivotal markers of establishing believable characters. Even in their pauses, you see them: ‘A brief silence ensued. In that interval, I picked the lint from a shirt button and with a ballpoint pen drew thirteen stars on a memo pad.’ I’m enthralled with his relentless wrestling with dualism (evidenced in his preference for tandem narratives, which eventually inform one another and overlap) and he’s near perfectly adept at conjuring alternate realities that you wish you could stop off in, on the way home from the shops. Oh rave, rave, rave.

I’m also continually in awe at the ease with which Murakami uses language. There are no wasted words. Nothing feels superfluous or excessive; he has a supreme sense of structure, and timing.

And there’s always a deliciously ominous undercurrent which courses through his work, a hint of mystical foreboding that keeps you slightly on the edge. I’ve learned to expect the unexpected. Just when you fear there might be predictability (as in: will Boku follow suit and ring God), Murakami creeps up behind you with an inflated paper bag and an outstretched hand.

Mix in some sardonic humour, quasi-cultural commentary, and a lasting contemplation of all the big themes – ‘the meaning of life and death, the nature of reality, the search for identity, the relationship of mind to time and memory’ (Rubin, 90) and truly, he has a winning combination. Witness Boku, and sexy ear girl, at the movies:

‘The films were exemplars of the dreadful. The sort of films where you feel like turning around and walking out the instant the title comes on after the roaring MGM lion. Amazing that films like that exist.

The first was the occult feature. The devil, who lives in the dripping, dank cellar of the town church and manipulates things through the weak preacher, takes over the town. The real question, though, was why the devil wanted to take over the town in the first place. All it was was a miserable nothing of a few blocks surrounded by cornfields’ (161).

Murakami is my hands down, all bets off, favourite novelist. A writer so postmodern he makes postmodernism seem like yesterday’s stale popcorn. Fortunately, I have many unread novels of his to work through, all perched up there expectantly on our cockatiel's favourite shelf (seriously). When I reach the end, I’m sure it will feel like I’m finishing all the seasons of something bent yet realist, like Six Feet Under, and being bummed out that I’ve watched it, sorry that it’s now in the past tense. Murakami’s still in my present, and when I’ve worked my way through his corpus I shall turn around and start the process all over again

No tengo ni idea de qué ha pasado en este libro.

كاش ميتونستم يه امتياز بين چهار و پنج بهش بدم... كتابى بود بدون هيچ نامى، كسى اسم واقعى نداشت انگار كسى واقعى نبود و در عين حال ميتونستم كاملا شخصيت اول رو درك كنم و حس كنم... با اينكه نميدونم چى، ولى مطمئنم ازش خيلى چيزا تو ذهنم جا خوش ميكنه

Nothing is easy with Murakami, as you have to be in a proper mood in order to savour his books.

Sometimes you fully resonate with him, sometimes (and this is the case...) his perpetual navigation between fiction and reality could be tiresome. Not to mention the strange feeling that you are always waiting for something important or at least peculiar to take place and more than often that doesn't happen...

برخلاف تصور خودم، کتاب دو روز زودتر تموم شد، از اون دست کتاب هایی هست که 150 صفحه آخرش اجتناب ناپذیره و آدم به اون آخرا که می رسه ترمز می بره!

برعکس تصور و تبلیغات خیلی از سایت ها و انتشارات، من توصیه می کنم کتاب های چهارگانه رت رو به ترتیب بخونید، این کتاب، سومین کتاب این مجموعه بود، اگه شماره یک و دو رو نخونید، خیلی از جاها نسبت به خاطرات و شخصیت ها براتون سوال پیش می یاد که اگه جوابشونو ندونین لذت کتاب رو خیلی کم می کنه...
موراکامی گاهی توی این کتاب یاد خاطراتی می افته که توی کتاب اول و دوم رخ دادن و یجورایی واجبه شماره ها رو به ترتیب بخونید.

در مورد خود این کتاب هم باید بگم که انقد سورئال هست که دیگه از مرز تخیلات من گذشته :))
بعضی از صحنه ها، مغز من قدرت تحلیل نداشت و شخصیت ها در فضایی تاریک و زمینه ی سیاه داشتن حرف می زدن، مغز من قدرت صحنه سازی با کتاب رو نداشت :))
این کتاب از افکا در کرانه هم سورئال تر بود بنظر من :))

دو تا توصیه دارم
اول اینکه حتما مجموعه چهارگانه رت رو به ترتیب بخونید
دوم اینکه اگه می خواد برای اولین بار موراکامی بخونید، این کتاب بهترین شروع میشه براتون

پیش به سوی رت چهار :دی

Murakami will not answer your questions!
In A wild Sheep Chase same as Murakami's other works, the ambiguous perspective towards reality is underscored and he refrains from answering the readers' question, forcing them to interpret meanings by themselves. This style is called non-solution and this actually contributes to the mysterious milieu of the novel, making it a truly postmodern detective story. One can say the story mirrors Jazz, you should not try to understand it, instead, you should "listen" and "relish" the moment. Even though the story begins very real, step-by-step it transmutes itself to surreal.
The story along with the nameless character reflects the pedestrian life that he is entangled within. The main part of the story or one can say "quest" commences when a strange man approaches the protagonist and asks him to find a certain sheep (with a mark on its fleece) before the man dies and thus begins the "wild sheep chase" as the title suggests. During the journey, they encounter other characters that have had an encounter with the sheep, describing their experience as something with the spiritual nature. But I do not want to go into details as they may spoil the story. The first time I read this novel what came to my mind was that maybe the sheep is the manifestation of power as maintained in Nietzsche's philosophy and that this power is in fact pursued by others (as it can be seen in this novel). However, after some deliberation, I believe there are no "specific" meanings and metaphors behind Murakami's story, the non-solution style is a segue to an infinite number of interpretations and metaphors, and my experience as an avid reader and a writer tells me when there are too many symbols there are actually non. Not a very popular answer for those who endeavor to extract meanings from every single line of a novel, BUT, considering how Murakami writes his novels- the fact that he concocts them as he goes- I think this answer actually seems sensible.