ABSTRACT
The first of Murakami Haruki’s novels I shall deal with is A Wild Sheep Chase (Hitsuji o meguru b™ken, 1982).1 It will be read in terms of the crisis of the legitimacy of rationality and the attack on the modernist ‘grand narrative’ (Lyotard 1979) together with its obsession with progress. The latter is a common postmodern theme and, I believe, is also inscribed as a main theme in this story. The hero of the novel, ‘I’, is a copywriter who is blackmailed by a dying right-wing Boss’ secretary into going to Japan’s northern-most island, Hokkaido, to find a sheep with a star-shaped birthmark. The sheep has the demonic ability to possess and manipulate people, and the hero finally discovers that his friend, Rat, had been possessed by this sheep and committed suicide in order to kill it. Most readers probably wonder what the sheep symbolises.2
