Reviews

Such a treat to discover The Rat #4 after thinking it was a trilogy! Murakami came back to write this in an act of “healing” after the success of Norwegian Wood, so you can really feel that love and passion reading the book.

The main character / narrator is a weird 34 year old guy who drives a used Subaru, just like me, so I found it to be extremely relatable. His voice is so unique and true in this novel. It feels like a slightly less wild sheep chase, with the same spooky goodness.

dyno8426's review against another edition

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5.0

What a fantastic conclusion to The Rat series! This being the fourth book in the series, I have listed more detailed impressions that I extracted from Murakami's writings very newly in A Wild Sheep Chase (The Rat #3) here.

Murakami's philosophies very simple and straightforward like his prose and characters. There are no bells-and-whistles, nothing fancy. Everything is matter-of-factly and almost universally relatable. The keystone which unravels and connects all the weird, unreal, dreamy aspects of the story is the limitation of human reason. At the very edges of human consciousness, where sub-consciousness takes control over definitions of reality and bankrupts us of the confidence and comfort of your usual life, you'll always find Murakami's characters crossing this threshold. They exhibit an awareness of the same finiteness of human experience and understanding. They are usually super lonely in feeling this impassive ongoings of life and are unaffected to an impressive degree about how quickly life changes around them. They do undergo human weaknesses of fear, anger and sadness over loss and loneliness. But they accept the meaninglessness that results due to our limitation of reason. Anything can happen, without comprehensible reason, and you can transition to that darker netherworld which exists only in your mind, visible only to you, devoid of explanation or causality. And (whipping out our beloved Dumbledore’s quote from HP#7,) just because it’s in your mind does not mean that it's not real. The characters make the readers experience a world without absolutes, without concreteness, is haunting and usually populated with emptiness. It only goes to signify the fragility and loneliness of one's consciousness in such a landscape. Accompanied by the little pleasures that one can gather in the fragments of existence (no matter which reality), one can only dance, dance and dance.

skylarinho's review against another edition

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dark emotional hopeful mysterious sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

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