A Wild Sheep Chase is one of Murakami’s most fantastical novels. An advertising executive, infatuated with a girl who possesses the most perfect ears (an erotic charge for him) uses a picture of a sheep with a star on its back. This catapults him into a weird adventure to find the mythical sheep up in the wilds of Hokkaido, Japan’s northern island. There are strange encounters, a hotel with an extra disappearing floor, and other oddities. A Wild Sheep Chase is an early Murakami work, but its remarkable and individual voice makes it one of the most thrilling of his books.

Superbly read by Rupert Degas with an edge of Raymond Chandler.