羊をめぐる冒険
1982
- japanese fiction
- translations into russian
- fiction, fantasy, general
- fiction, psychological
- japan, fiction
- fiction, mystery & detective, general
- near and far eastern fiction (fictional works by one author)
- fiction, action & adventure
- fiction
- mystery & crime
The story
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.
What it’s like
Dry, flat-lit urban Tokyo in the early 1980s gives way to the quiet, snow-muffled emptiness of northern Japan, and the prose holds the same unhurried, deadpan calm throughout: short declarative sentences, long lists of ordinary objects, meals, records and cigarettes described with a plain precision that makes them feel close enough to touch. The mood is wry, melancholic and faintly uncanny, the kind of book that drifts through hot summer afternoons and late-night kitchen silences, where a strange thing happens and is accepted as calmly as a change in the weather. Its pacing is loose and meandering, with digressions that linger on jazz, a hotel room, a dinner, a telephone that rings at the wrong moment, and its emotional register stays low and wistful rather than urgent. The central arc follows a restless, half-detached man slowly confronting loss and the thinness of his own life, and the surreal quest never resolves into thrills. Violence occurs but is sudden, sparse and unshowy, and sexual content is frank though not explicit. It suits readers who want a dreamlike, melancholy odyssey, fans of quiet absurdity and atmosphere over plot.
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