The Complete Works of Haruki Murakami -- The Ramayana

Author: Haruki Murakami
Publisher:
Publication Date: 2001-01-01
Features: The Ramayana of Many Colors is the third novel by Haruki Murakami after his debut works Kaze No Tani no Apollon (Hear the Wind Sing) and 1973 no Dama Yugi (The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes). Together with the aforementioned two, it forms the "I and the Mouse" trilogy. The novel is highly allegorical and mythological in tone, and the author considers its creation to have been "smooth until the very end, stopping at the perfect moment." The Ramayana of Many Colors is a substantial long-form work by Murakami, earning him the Naoki Prize for Literature. A superpowered sheep capable of controlling all of Japan goes missing, and its host—a powerful yakuza boss—is on the brink of death. A down-on-his-luck Tokyo office worker accidentally comes across a photograph of the sheep and, unexpectedly, becomes a target of the yakuza. Accompanied by his girlfriend, he embarks on an adventure to find the sheep. In the snowy, remote wilderness of Hokkaido, he finally meets the person who took the photograph—not the man himself, but his ghost, as the man with the nickname "Rat," already dead, had perished together with the source of all evil. The third work in Murakami's "Youth Trilogy," The Ramayana of Many Colors opens the door to a new chapter in Japanese literature with its unique blend of reality and fantasy.