Asian Horror: Asking for Assumptions (A Dangerous Ask)


For class this week, I attempted to read "A Wild Sheep Chase" by Haruki Murakami. Admittedly, I did not get very far into the novel as the nature or even the existence of good and evil is a debate I feel I don’t have the right to have an opinion on (which I know, can sound like a cop out, but if writing this blog post is any consolation, that is not my intention) and my prior experience with Eastern horror has been very little, but of what I’ve seen, is not my cup of tea.
Let’s just dive in, shall we? I read up to the point of the narrator and his girlfriends arrival at the hotel. I can pinpoint the moment I rolled my eyes, checked to see how much more I had to read on, and gave up on really trying to understand this novel. It was very early on, when I found that the narrator was going to go unnamed for the entirety of the novel. After a traumatic high school experience with the novel "Invisible Man", I’ve come to loathe how much a reader has to find meaning in the protagonists lack of a name, rather than the plot. This prejudice of mine, mixed with frankly a boring character, led to an unsuccessful read of "A Wild Sheep Chase". I’m not saying he was bland, but if the narrator were a spice- he would be flour.

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