Chasing Sheep?

I've just finished Haruki Murakami's Wild Sheep Chase - and I must say: here's a book that starts out great, rises toward something profound, and then gradually fades away. In this sense, the novel is something of a disappointment. I suppose I felt tricked: I mean, I was willing to go along for a literary ride, but by the end, I struggled to find meaning in Murakami's unyielding attention to, well, to sheep. Were these animals (who enter the human psyche) intended as a metaphor? Or are they instead (merely) players in an artistic scavenger hunt? So opaque and disjointed had things become by the final third of this novel that I struggled to remember what I had enjoyed so much about its opening pages. Still, though, despite this criticism, I'd like to register an intense appreciation for Murakami's Norwegian Wood - not a perfect novel, but a lasting one...and one without the animals.