The Strange Library

September 22, 2014
A boy's routine day at the public library becomes a trip down the rabbit hole in Murakami's (Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage) short novel. The boy meets a demanding old man, who forces him to read the books he's requested in a hidden reading room in the basement. After following the labyrinthine corridors, the boy is led by the old man into a cell, where he must memorize the history of tax collection in the Ottoman Empire. In the bowels of the library, the boy meets a beautiful, mute girl who brings him meals, as well as a subservient sheepman (whom we also meet in Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase) who fixes the boy crispy doughnuts and clues him in to the old man's sadistic plans. Full-page designs from Chip Kidd divide the sections, bolstering the book's otherworldliness with images from the text alongside mazelike designs and dizzying close-ups of painted faces. This dryly funny, concise fable features all the hallmarks of Murakami's deadpan magic, along with splashes of Lewis Carroll and the brothers Grimm. 32 illus. First printing: 75,000 copies.

October 15, 2014
"I'm going to slice you up nice and fine and feed you to the centipedes." Another off-kilter yarn from master storyteller Murakami: allegorical, shadowy and not at all nice.Murakami (Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, 2014, etc.) loves two things among many: Franz Kafka (think Kafka on the Shore) and secret places (think 1Q84). This latest, brief and terse, combines those two passions in the frightening vision of a hapless young man who, returning two books-How to Build a Submarine and Memoirs of a Shepherd-to the library, is sent to Room 107, deep in a basement he didn't know existed. Confronted by an apparently friendly but nevertheless no-nonsense old man, the youngster allows that he's interested in "how taxes were collected in the Ottoman Empire." And who wouldn't be? Well, that's enough to send our young fellow into a nightmare world featuring a blandly mysterious young woman, a sheep man, the ever present threat of danger and the nagging worry that his mom is going to be upset when he doesn't show up for supper. Even so, our young man has the presence of mind to ask the right questions: How, given strapped municipal budgets and library cuts, could "our city library have such an enormous labyrinth in its basement?" And why is he being imprisoned-for the answer comes back positive to his question of the Sheep Man, "Is this by any chance a jail cell?" It would take a Terry Gilliam, or perhaps a Kurosawa, to film Murakami's nightmare properly, and if the reader may well be puzzled over what the story, published in Japan in 2005, means at heart, then the prospect of the young man's being freed only if he passes rigorous questioning over, yes, taxation in the Ottoman Empire will ignite the fear-of-a-long-ago-final-exam syndrome in all of us. At once beguiling and disquieting-in short, trademark Murakami-a fast read that sticks in the mind.

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Starred review from December 1, 2014

Debuting mere months after his latest instant best seller, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, this fable is a surprise addition to Murakami's addictive oeuvre. After returning his library books, a boy is sent to Room 107 in search of other titles. There he's trapped by a bald old librarian, guarded by a Sheep Man, fed by a voiceless girl, and forced to memorize "three fat books" about the Ottoman tax system for insidious purposes. How will the boy get home to his mother (and pet starling) in time for dinner? VERDICT This novel is just 96 pages, with 32 of those illustrations curated and created by designer Chip Kidd. The artwork is intriguing, mysterious, and untranslated (hints: that's "Meiji Milk Chocolate" in Chapter 13 and an upside-down labeled planet zoom-out in Chapter 17). New audiences could read this as just another provocative, surreal tale, but Murakami fans will obsessively catalog the many multilayered references to previous titles, from the obvious Sheep Man (Trilogy of the Rat), labyrinthine other worlds (Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World), silently communicative women (After Dark) to, of course, librarians (Kafka on the Shore), plus much more. A mesmerizing Strange Library indeed. [See Prepub Alert, 9/8/14.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2014
Murakami's novels are odd, to be sure, but this short work, hot on the heels of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2014), compresses those oddities into one macabre fairy talelike story. A boy seeks out a book at the city library, only to be trapped there by a cruel old man and forced to read for days, stuffing knowledge into his brain, which the old man intends to slurp up. Whereas in longer Murakami novels, each strange scene is at least moored to some semblance of reality, this short work drifts apart, its eerie, dreamlike plot occurring completely within the walls of the labyrinthine prison beneath the library. Each object and character begins to take on a deeply symbolic quality, and, together with the intermittent full-page illustrations that merely suggest a connection to the story, the overall effect is unsettling yet captivating. This confounding work will probably not have as broad an appeal as his other novels, but fans of Murakami's weirdness, particularly his early books, will likely adore this distillation.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)