Haruki Murakami

Sheep hunting

Part one

MIDWEEK PICNIC

An old friend told me about her death by phone, having stumbled upon random lines in the newspaper. He read a single paragraph of the meager note straight into the phone. An ordinary newspaper chronicle. A young journalist, barely graduating from university, received an assignment and tried out his pen.

It was then and there that so-and-so, while driving a truck, hit so-and-so.

The possibility of a breach of duty resulting in death is being investigated...

-Where will the funeral be? – I asked.

- How do I know? – he was surprised. – Did she even have a family?

* * *

Of course, she had a family.

I called the police, asked for the family's address and phone number, then called the family and found out the date and time of the funeral. Nowadays, as someone said, if you try hard enough, you can learn anything.

Her family lived in the “old city”, Shitamachi. I unfolded a map of Tokyo, found the address, and traced her house with a thin red marker. It was indeed a very old area on the very edge of the capital. The branching web of subway lines, trains, and buses had long ago lost any intelligible clarity and, woven into the network of narrow streets and sewer canals, resembled wrinkles on the rind of a melon. On the appointed day, I took the commuter train from Waseda Station to the funeral. Before reaching the end, I got out, unfolded a map of the Tokyo suburbs and discovered that I could equally well be holding a map of the world in my hands. Getting to her house cost me several packs of cigarettes, which I had to buy one after another, asking for directions each time.

Her house turned out to be an old wooden building behind a picket fence made of brown boards. Bending down, I made my way through the low gate into the courtyard. The cramped garden on the left river seems to have been laid out without any particular purpose, “just in case”; a clay brazier thrown in the far corner was flooded by a good inch with water from long-ago rains. The soil in the garden turned black and glistened with dampness.

She ran away from home at sixteen; Apparently, this is also why the funeral took place very modestly, as if on the sly, in a close family circle. The family consisted entirely of old men, and either his own or half-brother, a man barely over thirty, was in charge of the ceremony.

The father, short, about fifty years old, in a black suit with a mourning ribbon on his chest, stood propping up the door frame, and did not show the slightest sign of life. Looking at it, I suddenly remembered what road asphalt looks like after the flood has just subsided.

As I left, I made a silent bow, and he bowed back just as silently.

I first met her in the fall of 1969; I was twenty years old, she was seventeen. Not far from the university there was a tiny coffee shop where our whole company gathered. The establishment is so-so, but with guaranteed hard rock - and extremely lousy coffee.

She always sat in the same place, with her elbows on the table, up to her ears in her books. Wearing glasses that looked like orthopedic devices, with bony wrists, she evoked a strange feeling of closeness in me. Her coffee was always cold, her ashtrays were always full of cigarette butts. If anything changed, it was only the titles of the books. Today it could be Mickey Spillane, tomorrow it could be Oe Kenzaburo, the day after tomorrow it could be Allen Ginsberg... In general, it would be a read, but it doesn’t matter which one. The student fraternity that flowed back and forth through the coffee shop kept leaving something for her to read, and she cracked the books like popcorn, from cover to cover, one after another. Those were the days when people easily lent books to each other, and I don’t think she ever had to embarrass anyone with this. Those were the times of the Doors, the Rolling Stones, the Birds, Deep Purple, and the Moody Blues. The air almost trembled with a strange tension: it seemed that all that was needed was some kind of kick for everything to fall into the abyss. The days were wasted with cheap whiskey, not very successful sex, arguments that changed nothing, and rented books. The stupid, awkward sixties were creakingly lowering their curtain.

I forgot her name.

One could, of course, once again unearth that newspaper chronicle with the message about her death. Just what her name was – it doesn’t matter to me at all now. I don't remember what it once sounded like. That's all.

Once upon a time there lived a Girl Who Slept With Anyone...

That's what her name was.

Of course, if you really look into it, she didn’t sleep with just anyone. I have no doubt that for this she had some criteria of her own, unknown to anyone. And yet, as reality showed to any close observer, she slept with the vast majority.

Only once, out of pure curiosity, did I ask her about these criteria.

“Well, how can I tell you...” she answered and thought for about thirty seconds. – Of course, it doesn’t matter with whom. It happens that I feel sick at the very thought... But you know, I just probably want to have time to get to know as many different people as possible. Maybe this is how it comes to me - an understanding of the world...

- From someone's beds?

It was my turn to think.

- Well... Well, how did it become clearer to you?

“A little bit,” she said.

* * *

From the winter of ’69 to the summer of ’70, I hardly saw her. The university was closed every now and then for various reasons, and I myself was pretty much caught up in a whirlpool of personal troubles.

When in the fall of 1970 I finally looked into the coffee shop, I did not find a single familiar face among the visitors. Not a single one - except her. As before, hard rock was playing, but the elusive tension that had once filled the air had evaporated without a trace. Only the lousy coffee we drank again remained unchanged from last year. I sat in front of her on a chair and we chatted about old friends. Many had already dropped out of university, one committed suicide, another disappeared without a trace... So we talked.

- Well, how did you live this year? – she asked me.

“It varies,” I answered.

-Have you become wiser?

- A little.

That night I slept with her for the first time.

I don’t really know anything about her, except for what I once heard - either from one of my mutual friends, or from her herself, casually in bed. The fact that while still a high school student she had a huge quarrel with her father and ran away from home (and, of course, from school) - that’s for sure, that was the story. But where she lived and what she did for a living, no one knew.

For days on end she sat on a chair in a rock cafe, drinking cup after cup of coffee, smoking one cigarette after another and turning over page after page of another book, waiting for the moment when some interlocutor would finally appear who would pay for all this coffee and cigarettes (not so much money for us even in those days) and with which she will most likely go to bed that night.

That's all I knew about her.

And so it happened: from that very autumn until last summer, once a week, on Tuesdays, she came to my apartment on the outskirts of Mitaka. She ate my simple cooking, filled ashtrays with cigarette butts, and made love to me to the fullest while listening to hard rock on Radio FEN. On Wednesday morning, after waking up, we walked with her in a small grove, gradually made our way to the campus and had lunch at the local canteen. And after lunch they drank thin coffee in the open area under the awnings and, if the weather was good, lay on the grass on the lawn and looked at the heavens.

“Midweek picnic,” she called it.

“Every time we come here, I feel like I’m on a picnic.”

- On a picnic?

- Well, yes. Everywhere you look there is grass. People around have happy faces...

Kneeling in the grass, she ruined several matches before finally lighting a cigarette.

– The sun rises, then sets; people appear and disappear... Time flows like air - everything is like at a real picnic, right? In two or three weeks I turned twenty-two. No hope of graduating from university anytime soon, no reason to quit halfway. At the crossroads of doubts and disappointments, for several months in a row I did not dare to take a single step in life.

The world around me continued to spin - only I, it seemed, did not move at all. Whatever appeared to my eyes in that autumn of 1970, everything was shrouded in a strange haze of sadness, everything at once and with catastrophic speed faded, losing color. The rays of the sun, the smell of grass, the barely audible sounds of rain - even those irritated me. I was haunted by a dream about a night train. Always the same. A train full of tobacco smoke and toilet stench, so packed with people that you can’t breathe. In the carriage, where there is nowhere for an apple to fall, the vomited sheets stick to the body. Unable to bear it, I get up from the shelf, squeeze through the doors and get off at a random station. The area is abandoned and deserted - not a single light. You can't even see the switchman at the station. No clock, no schedule - nothing... Such a dream.

At that time, it seems to me that I suited her in many ways. Even though it was absurd and painful, she needed him exactly as he was. I don’t remember now what it was suitable for, what it was needed for. Maybe I only needed myself and nothing more, but that didn’t bother her at all. Or maybe she was just having fun - but with what exactly? Be that as it may, it was not the thirst for affection and tenderness that attracted me to her. And now, as soon as I remember it, that strange, indescribable feeling comes back to me. Loneliness and sadness - as if from the touch of someone’s hand, suddenly extended through a wall invisible in the air.

Sometimes you walk forward as if in the dark, making your way slowly, step by step, testing the ground under your feet. And you don’t know what awaits you when you take the next cautious step. Reading Haruki Murakami's novel Sheep Hunt is like such a journey. We can’t say that it’s dangerous, but we definitely can’t call it calm either. This is a constant work of the mind and effort to understand what is happening. The feeling of something mysterious and incomprehensible does not leave you.

A book by one of the most unusual authors, which became the third in the “Rat Trilogy”. And yet there is no feeling that you can relax, since all the questions have been answered. There is still something left in the finale that haunts you. The novel is written as a legend, which has an artistic component, a plot, and also contains thoughts about everything. It is noteworthy that none of the characters in the novel have a name. Each is called simply by some word or phrase that characterizes it.

Legend says that the soul of a Sheep can move into a human body. She captures him, and the person ceases to be himself. He can achieve a lot, having unlimited strength and capabilities, rise from the very bottom. But this will not lead to positive changes, since you never know how long the Sheep will live inside you. And when she leaves your body, you will become nothing.

On our website you can download the book “Sheep Hunting” by Haruki Murakami for free and without registration in fb2, rtf, epub, pdf, txt format, read the book online or buy the book in the online store.

Sheep Hunting by Haruki Murakami

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Title: Sheep Hunt

About the book “Sheep Hunting” by Haruki Murakami

Popular Japanese author Haruki Murakami released a series of books, “The Rat Trilogy,” in which the last novel was “Sheep Hunt.” The work is presented in the original author's style, characteristic of all the writer's literary works.

The third book, “Sheep Hunt,” is partly a continuation of the first two volumes, but can be considered a completely independent work. Haruki Murakami mentions the characters of the previous parts of the trilogy, but does not give specific names to the heroes, which creates the impression of connectedness of the parts and at the same time their isolation. Only the image of the Rat flashes in all parts, demonstrating new facets of the hero’s character.

The novel “Sheep Hunt” is filled with “Murakamov’s” spontaneity in the presentation of familiar things. The author describes ordinary everyday things with amazing poetry, noting individual details that distinguish the described object from other similar ones. It is enough to remember how much love and admiration the main character aroused in the ears of one of the heroines of the novel.

Haruki Murakami's descriptions lull, but do not tire. The author is able to hold the reader's interest, adding fuel to the fire gradually, drop by drop, giving food for thought and philosophizing.

It is difficult to formulate what the novel “The Sheep Hunt” is about. This is a book about how dangerous sheep are that have crept into all areas of human life. In the novel, the main character meets many sheep and is looking for the only one, his sheep. Her image as presented by Murakami differs from the traditional perception of sheep as meek and sweet little animals. The author's key character is a despot and tyrant, who considers himself a deity who gives a person strength, ambition, talents, but deprives him of his personality.
Haruki Murakami presents the mystical, slightly magical and philosophical story in his characteristic manner, in a beautiful, soft style. Reading a novel is reminiscent of a pleasant conversation over a cup of tea, when suddenly it turns out that the interlocutor was not there, the conversation was with oneself.

The novel “Sheep Hunt” became another confirmation of the charismatic talent of the author. His works are unique; it is impossible to find similarities with other authors. Murakami must be read in order to comprehend the world around him, to see it for the first time through the eyes of a child, not clouded by external influences. Recommended for reading by fans of Murakami's talent, connoisseurs of Japanese culture and simply lovers of good reading.

On our website about books, you can download the site for free without registration or read online the book “Sheep Hunting” by Haruki Murakami in epub, fb2, txt, rtf, pdf formats for iPad, iPhone, Android and Kindle. The book will give you a lot of pleasant moments and real pleasure from reading. You can buy the full version from our partner. Also, here you will find the latest news from the literary world, learn the biography of your favorite authors. For beginning writers, there is a separate section with useful tips and tricks, interesting articles, thanks to which you yourself can try your hand at literary crafts.

Quotes from the book “Sheep Hunting” by Haruki Murakami

The most painful things can never be expressed properly...