A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami
Published 1982 · 95,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Surrealist Fiction, Mystery
How hard is A Wild Sheep Chase to read?
A Wild Sheep Chase scores 65 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 42 out of 100
- Colloquial contemporary prose in Birnbaum's translation, with light historical vocabulary around Manchuria and Hokkaido settlement and a great deal of Western music and brand reference.
- Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
- Short, cool, hardboiled sentences and heavy dialogue, with the pace deliberately kept fast.
- Abstraction: 62 out of 100
- Beneath the detective plot runs a continuous argument about will, mediocrity and what fills an empty person, delivered through the sheep and through the narrator's flat refusals to want anything.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Japanese colonial history in Manchuria, Hokkaido's settler past and the structure of postwar political-criminal power are given in compact briefings the reader must retain.
- Narrative indirection: 74 out of 100
- A narrator without a name who reports events without interpreting them, an antagonist who never appears, and a friend whose account of what happened arrives after his death.
- Symbolic density: 80 out of 100
- The star-marked sheep, the girlfriend's ears, the Sheep Man, the dead pioneer village and the empty mountain house all work as figures for a hollowness the book never names directly.
- Ironic distance: 66 out of 100
- An epic quest conducted by a man who mostly wants a drink, with the machinery of national power represented by livestock. The deadpan is total and carries the book's grief without stating it.
- Resolution withholding: 80 out of 100
- The Boss's organisation, the sheep's purpose and the girlfriend's disappearance are all left unexplained, and the novel ends with the narrator sitting on a beach crying for reasons he does not give.
- Structural complexity: 58 out of 100
- Linear quest structure across eight parts, interrupted by inserted letters, a stranger's lecture on sheep in Japan, and a long account delivered by a character who is already dead.
How A Wild Sheep Chase is regarded
A Wild Sheep Chase holds a literary regard score of 72 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.