Wild sheep hunting

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Wild sheep hunt ( Japanese 羊 を め ぐ る 冒 険 Hitsuji o Meguru Bōken ) is a novel by Haruki Murakami . It was first published in Japanese in 1982; the German translation was first published by Insel-Verlag in 1991 .

content

The novel begins in Tokyo in 1970. The first-person narrator has an erotic relationship with a student friend. When he asks her if she would kill someone, she says no, but reveals that she will die at the age of 25. She then actually died in 1978 at the age of 26.

The rest of the story takes place in 1978. Again the narrator gets to know a woman, this time one with strikingly beautiful ears, whom he noticed in a photo. At the same time, he himself published a picture of a sheep pasture in Hokkaido for an advertising agency , which brought the agency a visit from an agent. His client, the so-called strange man , the narrator notes, has a special relationship with sheep, as one of them is depicted on their lighter. A letter from a school friend who calls himself a rat arrives, in which he reveals that he now lives in Hokkaido. In addition, a photograph of a sheep pasture is enclosed with the letter.

When the narrator takes a closer look at the strange man , he learns that he was "taken possession of by a sheep" during his military service in Manchuria in the 1930s , as is often the case in local folklore. Japanese culture, on the other hand, has hardly any relation to sheep, since it was only introduced there as a farm animal in the 19th century. The strange man instructs the narrator to visit the pasture shown in the photo on Hokkaido. In return, the latter also takes care of the narrator's decrepit cat.

The narrator travels to Hokkaido with his girlfriend. In Sapporo they stay at the Hotel Delfin , which makes a gloomy, run-down impression on them. There the two are made aware of the sheep professor , a person who was also "taken over by a sheep" and for whom this meant the end of his career. The narrator places an advertisement in the local newspaper with which he searches for the school friend Ratte . In addition, the narrator goes without his girlfriend, who is waiting for him in the hotel, to the remote property of Ratte, where he drinks whiskey and cooks for himself. He is visited there by a man in the Schafsmann, then by Ratte himself, who says that he had a connection with this property in his childhood and that he has therefore returned. Ratte also tells him that he has been dead for about a week.

When the narrator returns to Sapporo, he learns that his girlfriend has already traveled back alone. The narrator doesn't get the hangover back either, since the strange man has changed his name in the meantime. After going to a bar in Tokyo, the narrator goes to the sea and cries.

criticism

“As I said, this is a book from the critical decades before the turn of the millennium, but not a socially critical, ecologically conscious or even politically critical novel. As in other Murakami novels, there is a cynical tower society whose involvement in mafia-like economic and political dealings is touched on with no deeper interest, which is just a sign that there is no prospect of clarifying the situation or anything even to turn. [...] Well, it is like this: Reading Murakami is comforting even to people who are not sad at all, maybe that is Murakami's secret. "

- Susanne Mayer : When the snow melts in: The time

continuation

The novel Tanz mit dem Schafsmann continues the plot of Wilde Schafsjagd and begins four years after the end of the first story.

literature

  • Haruki Murakami: Wild sheep hunt. Translated from the Japanese by Annelie Ortmanns. btb, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-442-73474-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ zeit.de