: The main character is looking for a friend in whom the spirit of the Sheep has instilled himself, who wants to create the Empire of Absolute Anarchy with his help. To save the world, the hero’s friend commits suicide, hoping that the Sheep will also die.

Parts 1-2

First-person narration. The hero finds out about the death of a longtime girlfriend with whom he had a relationship in 1970. He recalls the divorce from his wife, about their life together and is surprised at how feelings disappeared without a trace.

It is very difficult when in youth you experience both marriage and divorce ...

Their marriage was ruined by boredom, hopelessness and lack of mutual love.

Parts 3-4

The hero meets an unusual girl with magical ears and extrasensory abilities. She foresees the future and predicts extraordinary adventures to the hero.

Secretary of Sensei (a big shadow businessman and politician) comes to the hero’s advertising company. He orders to withdraw from print a certain advertisement with a photo of sheep on the background of the landscape.

Up to ninety-five percent of all the information that your eyes and ears perceive every day is pre-selected by someone’s will and paid for from someone’s pocket! ...

The hero is invited to the house of the dying Sensei for a business proposal.

Part 5

The friend of the hero’s childhood and youth, the Rat, disappears and writes letters of philosophical content to him. The rat changes its lifestyle and travels around the country without a specific goal.

I just probably want to know as many people as possible. Maybe that's how it comes to me - understanding the world ...

In one of the letters, he sends him a banal picture of a landscape with sheep and asks him to publish it in an advertisement. The hero shows the letters of a friend to two acquaintances: an elderly friend - the Chinese Jay, a bartender who knew both friends from his youth, and a girl who loved the Rat. In his memoirs, the Rat appears as a strange guy.

Part 6

At Sensei's house, his secretary tells the hero about the sheep. In an advertising photo, they find a strange sheep of an unknown breed with a spot on its back. The secretary initiates the hero into the secret of the owner of the house - the leader of the right, Sensei. During the Japanese war with China, in 1936, Sensei was reborn into another person from the mediocrity he was, and a deadly hematoma formed in his brain.

The whole world, in principle, is one sheer mediocrity; you are mediocrity, because you are part of this world.

After leaving prison, where he was serving a term for banditry, Sensei changed his worldview and became a shadow right-wing leader. Having created his Organization, the Empire, he secretly controlled society. His methods are blackmail, corruption, intrigue, intimidation.

Since 1936, the Sheep appeared to Sensei in hallucinations, he made her image with his coat of arms. The secretary considers Sheep a hypostasis, the embodiment of the essence of Sensei, and requires the hero to find the Sheep. He believes: the life of the owner and the prosperity of his Empire depend on the Sheep. The hero receives money for two months of searching. Girlfriend with magic ears offers to go with him.

Part 7

Heroes come to the city of Sapporo, stay at the Dolphin Hotel and begin the search for the Sheep. By chance they meet Professor Sheep - the father of the hotel owner. He tells his story of meeting with the Sheep. During the 1935 Chinese campaign, a Sheep, then a young explorer, lost in the Chinese forests, was introduced to him. In those places - in the north of China and in Mongolia - the Sheep often inhabits a person.

Locals ... sacredly believe that whoever the sheep enters receives a special heavenly blessing. Even in the annals ... the "star-shaped white Aries" is mentioned, which settled in Genghis Khan ...

During the year that Sheep existed as a scientist, he successfully engaged in scientific work: ethnography and animal husbandry.When he returned to Japan, the Sheep left him. The professor found out: this sheep is immortal, and the person into whom it belongs is also. “The sheep decide everything. She likes the "master" - she can remain in it for decades. She will become something not to her liking - jump outside, and remember what they called! The people that the sheep threw are called "two-grained." The professor is sure that, taking over people, the Sheep has a definite goal - “some kind of a global plan for the transformation of man and humanity.” According to Professor Sheep, a "baptized" person loses immortality and loses peace and happiness.

The sheep leaves, leaving a naked Idea in the head of a person. However, there is no way to express this Idea without the sheep itself! This is the whole horror of "two-sidedness."

The professor summarizes: “The sheep has not made anyone happy yet. And all because in front of the Sheep good and evil in human life lose all meaning ... ". At the end of the conversation, the professor admits that he recently told the whole story to a stranger. From the photo he identifies the Rat. The professor indicates the place where the Sheep was photographed; it’s far in the mountains, on sheep’s pastures, next to the villa of the rich man, Rat’s father. The hero and the girl go there.

Part 8

Heroes come to the city of Junitaki ("Twelve Waterfalls"). Professor Sheep once raised sheep here, and later sold this land to Rat's father. With the help of a local shepherd shepherd, the heroes get to the old villa. From the shepherd they learn that the owner - the Rat - has been living here for half a year. In the house are visible traces of the Rat, but not himself; the heroes remain waiting for him.

The main character searches the house and garage in search of any signs from the Rat, but finds only traces of sheep's wool. At some point, a girlfriend suddenly disappears, promising that everything will end well.

Everything from which even its faintest smell could come, disappeared without a trace. I even thought she took her prints with her.

She is replaced by the Man-Sheep - an elderly deserter with a mental retardation, dressed in sheepskin clothes. From his mysterious speeches, the hero understands that he knows the Rat and for some reason kicked out his girlfriend. Sheepman visits the hero from time to time. Finally, he finds a sign from the Rat, indicating that a friend deliberately lured him here. The rat found out that Sensei was from Junitaki, from which our hero understood that the Secretary of Sensei also knew in advance about all his steps in search of the Sheep.

On the next visit of the Sheepman, the hero does not find his reflection in the mirror and makes an appointment with the Rat. At night, he appears and, invisible, tells a friend how the Sheep moved into him, luring him into an empty father’s villa. “It’s very creepy to talk about what happened next ... Whatever words I describe this horror, you still can’t comprehend it,” warns the Rat, adding that he committed suicide a week before the arrival of a friend in order to destroy the Sheep . According to the Rat, Sheep tried to take possession of his whole being because of the weakness of spirit and morality that he had felt in himself from his youth. This weakness, which he was ashamed of, made him move away from acquaintances.

In captivity at the Sheep, the Rat saw “The Crucible of the Universe, in which everything and everything is remelted,” divinely beautiful.

And at the same time - so evil, diabolical that the blood in my veins freezes with horror ... As soon as a person plunges his body there, everything human for him ceases to exist.

The Rat realized that the Sheep had previously used Sensei's body to create the giant Power Machine. For the embodiment of the universal negative idea, Sensei was not suitable, because "it was a complete zero." And the Sheep chose the Rat ... If her plan was a success, then the “Empire of Absolute Anarchy. When all the contradictions fall into one. And in the center - I'm with a Sheep in my head. "

At the end of a sad conversation, the Rat admits that his life was completely meaningless. At the request of a friend, the hero starts the clock in the morning and connects an explosive device.Going down from the mountains, the hero meets Secretary Sensei. He says that he arranged for the hero this trip so that he would declassify the Rat - he would not believe anyone else. The secretary decided to replace Sensei in the Organization-Empire, and then he needed a Rat with a Sheep inside. The secretary gives the hero a large cash receipt, goes to a villa in the mountains, and there the Rat explodes both.

Epilogue

The hero visits the Chinese bartender Jay and gives him the receipt received for the Rat. Crying alone on the riverbank, the hero feels completely lost and devastated.