A Wild Sheep Chase By Haruki Murakami Translated by Alfred Birnbaum. 299 pages. Kodansha International.
A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami is a bold new advance in a category of international fiction that could be called the trans-Pacific novel. Youthful, slangy, political and allegorical, Mr. Murakami is a writer who seems to be aware of every current American novel and popular song. Yet with its urban setting, yuppie characters and subtle feeling of mystery, even menace, his novel is clearly rooted in modern Japan.
This isn't the traditional fiction of Kobo Abe (The Woman in the Dunes), Yukio Mishima (The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea) or Japan's only Nobel laureate in literature, Yasunari Kawabata (Snow Country). Mr. Murakami's style and imagination are closer to that of Kurt Vonnegut, Raymond Carver and John Irving. In fact, the 40-year-old author, one of the most popular novelists in Japan, has translated the works of several American writers, including Irving and Carver. His outlook is international; he now lives in Rome.
There isn't a kimono to be found in A Wild Sheep Chase. Its main characters, men and women, wear Levis. They are the children of prosperity, less interested in what Toyota or Sony have wrought than in having a good time while searching in jazz bars for self-identity.
They take comfort in drinking, chain-smoking and casual sex. Listening to their conversation, they could be right at home on the Berkeley campus in the 1960's. It may help that the novel is racily translated from the Japanese by Alfred Birnbaum, an American who grew up in Tokyo and who studied at the University of California.
The unnamed, newly divorced 30-year-old protagonist of A Wild Sheep Chase has moved on, somewhat haphazardly, from college life into advertising and public relations. He and a partner turn out corporate newsletters and display the proper degree of contempt for their clients - and themselves.
In describing a right-wing magnate simply named the Boss, who has cornered the advertising business in Tokyo and extended his power into national politics, the protagonist's partner could pass for an ad man sounding off at the end of the day on Madison Avenue or Fleet Street:
''To hold down advertising is to have nearly the entire publishing and broadcasting industries under your thumb. There's not a branch of publishing or broadcasting that doesn't depend in some way on advertising. It'd be like an aquarium without water. Why, 95 percent of the information that reaches you has already been preselected and paid for.''
Their own cynical newsletters, he continues, contribute to corporate concealment: ''Every company's got a secret it doesn't want exploded right in the middle of the annual shareholders' meeting. In most cases, they'll listen to the word handed down. In sum, the Boss sits squarely on top of a trilateral power base of politicians, information services and the stock market.''
But Mr. Murakami isn't simply taking a swipe at big business here. As part of his developing plot, he is setting up the characters of his young people and distancing them from the godfatherly Boss and his sleazy lieutenant, who has a degree from Stanford University. As a former war criminal who has escaped trial, possibly with the collusion of the American occupation leadership, the Boss seeks something more than to sit on top of a domineering communications empire. Dying, he wants to gain the spiritual power of a legendary foreign sheep with a star on its back - the only one of its kind in all of Japan -that dwells somewhere in the lonely mountainous snow country.
On the surface, A Wild Sheep Chase is just that: a mystery story with a long chase. A photograph of the wild sheep has appeared accidentally in a newsletter; like Dashiell Hammett's Maltese falcon, the singular sheep is pursued by clashing interests. Is the sheep a symbol of something beyond the reach of an ordinary man, a devilish temptation? Does this wild sheep represent heroic morality or a Nietzschean superpower? Nietzsche is mentioned in the novel; so is the obsessive quest for Moby-Dick. The answer, if any, is left to the reader's perception.
Along the chase route, we meet interesting characters. One is called the Sheep Professor, another the Rat, a rather nice fellow despite his name. The most appealing is the protagonist's girlfriend, who is plain-looking except for one feature that arouses him - and reveals the author's offbeat sense of humor and style. Here is how she is described, with echoes of the hard-boiled California school of detection:
''She was 21, with an attractive slender body and a pair of the most bewitching, perfectly formed ears. She was a part-time proofreader for a small publishing house, a commercial model specializing in ear shots and a call girl in a discreet intimate-friends-only club. Which of the three she considered her main occupation, I had no idea. Neither did she.''
What makes A Wild Sheep Chase so appealing is the author's ability to strike common chords between the modern Japanese and American middle classes, especially the younger generation, and to do so in stylish, swinging language. Mr. Murakami's novel is a welcome debut by a talented writer who should be discovered by readers on this end of the Pacific.