A Wild Sheep Chase

  This week for J-Horror, I read A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami.  I'm very inexperienced in Japanese horror, and honestly most Japanese literature in general.  I didn't really have any assumptions for how the novel would be, but after reading A Wild Sheep Chase, I definitely have some opinions. 
  First off, I'm admittedly writing this blog a few weeks after I read the novel.  However, I remember in class even after I had just read it, the story seemed hard to remember and grasp.  It literally feels like trying to remember a dream, and I think that's because the story was just so weird and out there, and so different from everything that I usually read.  A great word to describe this book is trippy.  It has a lot of imagery, and the story is woven together in a way that I feel is supposed to make it feel very dream-like. 
  This book was honestly too hard to follow for me.  Because I feel like I only remember certain aspects of it, it's honestly hard to talk about.  One thing that I didn't like is that none of the characters were really named.  I found it really hard to connect to the characters because not only were their lives so different from mine, but they seemed (like I touched on before), like characters in a dream. 
  I think the fact that I was raised in Western civilization and have mainly been exposed to Western media definitely had an impact on the way I read the story.  I feel like Western stories are more direct, and really focus on creating a likable (good) character that one can relate to.  I didn't find this in A Wild Sheep Chase.  I did appreciate going out of my comfort zone and seeing how some different cultures' stories vary from those that I'm familiar with.

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