2011 Haruki Murakami Challenge #3

And so it all makes sense, sort of. A Wild Sheep Chase: A Novel is the third book in Haruki Murakami's 'Trilogy of the Rat', and having read the first two I was really depending on this one to bring it all together. I have to say it did, and it even wrapped the whole of it up quite well with the last chapter, which was my big complaint with the second book in the series, that it had no real end. That all makes a sort of Harukian sort of sense now because the second book didn't have an ending it was just a sort of throughway to this book.

With all that said, I have read a few reviews online about this book, '..Sheep Chase', and have found that many readers have read it knowing it was the third book of a trilogy without feeling they'd missed anything. They're right, you can absolutely read this book without having read the other two because this book is, in my never humble opinion, the an actual novel, while the other two feel to me know as little more than extended prologues, or even something written after to illuminate a few things. That sounds harsh and dismissive, but I don't mean it to. The previous two are good, they are just very different, and without a few subtleties they would have no connection to each other or this book at all.

This is also the most complete book of the three, it is evident when reading it that it took some planning to get right, he had to know an ending in absolute terms to even begin, and that's what makes these three books taken together as such a great discovery for any of Haruki's longtime fans. You can clearly see a writer flexing and building his talents to what they have become today. In the first of the three he started with his meandering sort of everyday prose that best evokes the 'lost in a crowd' feeling that is so prevalent in Japanese fiction. In the second he first uses his alternating stories tool that has become almost a trademark of his style, though he does not use it in the third. Then, in this the third, he finally uses the part of his writing to imagine, untethered by convention, unique oddities, like a demon sheep with a star on its back, and to build mythologies around them.

I loved this book for a laundry list of reasons. Haruki Murakami is capable of making the mundane captivating and the alien seem coffee shop normal.