Japan is depicted in this novel as a country with a complicated, war-torn history. Traces of this history are seen throughout the narrator’s quest for the sheep, and are manifested in the lives of the novel’s characters, many of whom seem to be suffering from a sort of spiritual restlessness. There is the Sheep Professor, who is haunted by the magical sheep that “invaded” him while he was in Manchuria; the Rat, who is constantly on the run from his own life; and the narrator himself, who no longer feels an attachment to his hometown, apart from his bond with an elderly Chinese bar owner, and is adrift in his Tokyo life.

What these characters all have in common is their sense of being exiles in their own country and the bewildered attachments that they have formed to places, or to entities, that are not quite theirs. The Rat spends his last days in his family’s former farmhouse, which was appropriated by the US Army during World War II and then given back to the town, which can no longer afford to maintain the house and the land around it.