His life was like a recurring nightmare: a train to nowhere. But an ordinary life has a way of taking an extraordinary turn. Add a girl whose ears are so exquisite that, when uncovered, they improve sex a thousand-fold, a runaway friend, a right-wing politico, an ovine-obsessed professor and a manic-depressive in a sheep outfit, implicate them in a hunt for a sheep, that may or may not be running the world, and the upshot is another singular masterpiece from Japan’s finest novelist. 

I swallowed my breath and gazed at her, transfixed. My mouth went dry. From no part of me could I summon a voice. For an instant, the white plaster wall seemed to ripple. The voices of the other diners and the clinking of their dinnerware grew faint, then once again returned to normal. I heard the sound of waves, recalled the scent of a long-forgotten evening. Yet all this was but a mere fragment of the sensations passing through me in those few hundredths of a second.

I was reading and reading and all I could think of – it feels like I’m reading someone else’s jumbled dreams. My thoughts began to wander, my physical attention was gone. I had to force myself to refocus and continue to make sense of what I was looking at.

I interpreted the novel to be a story of emotion journey more than a story of physical journey. There was an actual journey involved as the main character went in search of the mythical sheep, but the true focus of the book was on the character’s emotions. Murakami didn’t even give the protagonist (or many of the other characters in the novel) a name. The main character could stand for any one of us.

There are symbolic dreams—dreams that symbolize some reality. Then there are symbolic realities—realities that symbolize a dream. Symbols are what you might call the honorary town councillors of the worm universe. In the worm universe, there is nothing unusual about a dairy cow seeking a pair of pliers. A cow is bound to get her pliers sometime. It has nothing to do with me. […]

he major problem is that everything becomes protracted and complex. I ask the cow, “Why do you want pliers?” And the cow answers, “I’m really hungry.” So I ask, “Why do you need pliers if you’re hungry?” The cow answers, “To attach them to branches of the peach tree.” I ask, “Why a peach tree?” To which the cow replies, “Well, that’s why I traded away my fan, isn’t it?” And so on and so forth. The thing is never resolved, I begin to resent the cow, and the cow begins to resent me. That’s a worm’s eye view of its universe. The only way to get out of that worm universe is to dream another symbolic dream.

I was thinking to myself – what the hell am I reading? This fantasy mixed with dreams mixed with reality – it all felt like a drug-induced fever dream. The book received international praise and a lot of people appreciate the different stories that make up the whole. I’m not sure. I didn’t care for his obsession with ears, his stories about drinking and cats and rats and all sorts.

I went over your vita in some detail. You have an interesting history. Now people can generally be classified into two groups: the mediocre realists and the mediocre dreamers. You clearly belong to the latter. Your fate is and will always be the fate of a dreamer.

I couldn’t agree more. This was mediocre dreaming at best.

The world is mediocre. About that there is no mistake. Well then, has the world been mediocre since time immemorial? No. In the beginning, the world was chaos, and chaos is not mediocre. The mediocratization began when people separated the means of production from daily life. For when Karl Marx posited the proletariat, he thereby cemented their mediocrity. And precisely because of this, Stalinism forms a direct link with Marxism. I affirm Marx. He was one of those rare geniuses whose memory extended back to primal chaos. And by the same token, I have high regard for Dostoyevsky. Nonetheless, I do not hold with Marxism. It is far too mediocre.

I nearly rolled my eyes out of my sockets. So pretentious – yet offering nothing. I read it because I’ve liked some of his previous work but this story, all in all, was below standard.