Hitsuji o meguru bōken

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Hitsuji o meguru bōken (Japanese language, 1982, Kōdansha)

405 pages

Japanese language

Published Jan. 4, 1982 by Kōdansha.

ISBN:
9784062002417

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4 stars (2 reviews)

It begins simply enough: A twenty-something advertising executive receives a postcard from a friend, and casually appropriates the image for an insurance company's advertisement. What he doesn't realize is that included in the pastoral scene is a mutant sheep with a star on its back, and in using this photo he has unwittingly captured the attention of a man in black who offers a menacing ultimatum: find the sheep or face dire consequences. Thus begins a surreal and elaborate quest that takes our hero from the urban haunts of Tokyo to the remote and snowy mountains of northern Japan, where he confronts not only the mythological sheep, but the confines of tradition and the demons deep within himself.

10 editions

A wild sheep chase

4 stars

I first decided to read this book in the original Japanese. In order to do so, I got the English translation, to compare and check my understanding (my Japanese is not so good yet). Very quickly I discovered that the English translation, while obviously telling the same story, is rather a loose interpretation stylistically (there are articles out there explaining these deliberate choices that Murakami himself agreed to). So then I got the French version. The French version is closer to the original text; I was reading the three in tandem, and at around the halfway point, there was a sentence which the English translator translated as : "She changed into a red dress and went home" (he's talking about a woman he was looking at through the window) and the French translator translated as "My girlfriend came back, having changed into a red dress". This piqued my interest, and …