He finds an old man there, and admits he's looking for some information about Ottoman tax collection -- it had popped into his head on his way home from school: Moriko's head popped into the small circle of white light. "Dr Sato tells me that there is a small book light beside the book". Welcome . . . once again, to Murakamiland: sheep men, waifs, quests, attentiveness to little (odd) things, a labyrinth, a stairway down . . . absurdity and irrationality, the tension between the fantastical and the everyday, real and unreal, sadness and loss, then sudden shifts out of the blue, and plenty of the plain runic. . . . [ The Strange Library] plumb[s] the kind of questions that leave us all wishing for more room to breathe: the singular and ever-solitary individual . . . the loss of identity (for better or worse), groping in the dark, self-understanding in an unknowable world, the dignity of idiosyncrasies. . . . The spirit and tone of the writing: As if Murakami is driving down a strange road, not know[ing] what’s to come around the next curve: alert, aware, but as in the dark as the reader. He is, however, a really good driver.”— The Christian Science Monitor These aren't books he can take home with him, and the old man is rather insistent that he read them there -- never mind that it's near closing time ("They do what I tell them -- if I say it's all right, then it's all right").

Then, there is the leitmotif of stolen time. Speaking again of the girl, the narrator tells us that “she seemed exhausted. She had lost her color and had grown transparent, so that I could see the wall behind her.” And ever since I was little my mother had told me, if you don’t know something, go to the library and look it up. Unfortunately they do not speak English, so I will act as an interpreter through the procedure" said Moriko with a smile. "If you would follow me please." The Sheep Man is another Murakami character who has made multiple appearances. First introduced in A Wild Sheep Chase, this distinctive half-man, half-sheep character is an enigma among Murakami fans. Even though his motives are unknown, he is often known to aid the protagonists on their journey and give valuable advice.

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Haruki Murakami has a fascinating ability to break open the natural world and let loose all the magic that we hope and suspect is lurking right under the surface. The Strange Library is a cause for celebration in the Murakami ouveur, even just for the simple fact that its existence signals that the well-respected novelist has achieved a superstar status in the world of reading; even more worth celebrating as this status is not commonly held these days by an author with such literary chops and depth of heart. It is also satisfying to see the novel used as an art-form beyond the printed word as Chip Kidd has done here (this is nothing new or groundbreaking, such as B.S. Johnson's book-in-a-box The Unfortunates, but still refreshing). In an age of digital books it is relieving to see publishers producing a reason to go out and buy the physical copy, offering so much more than just the story for those who still enjoy the tangible paper. Though the book is merely a single short story¹—a story that works like a microcosm of all that is Murakami even if a bit watered-down—with a cover price just above a standard novel, it is a gorgeous work of art to support the content and proves that Murakami is enough of a household name to be able to release such an exciting collectors piece. The story is set pre-Google, and it should probably be read as if Kindles and audio books don't exist either. One of the exciting trips for all the bookworms will be their trips to the library. This trip will help you to discover new books that entertain you and sometimes even change your life in the best way possible. What if this journey turns into a nightmare? Murakami tells a similar story of a boy who gets trapped inside a library.

The man on the left bowed first and then the one on the right bowed a little deeper. This earned a reproachful look from the other. His mother taught him that when he wants to know something, he should go to the library. Thus the library is part of his attempt to be self-sufficient. But it is also his escape from reality. The nightmare is a hideous parody of this desire to escape: the place that he escapes to has become the place he must escape from. I may have mumbled something under my breath at this point. And it may have been amplified by the 'instrument' enough for Moriko to hear. We are crazy about Twin Peaks in Japan. Do you remember the room with red curtains and the dancing dwarf? That’s the room I mean when I think about subconsciousness. There is something strange and special in yourself. David Lynch knows that too and so we can both create those images, the same images." So just because I don't exist in the sheep man's world, it doesn't mean that I don't exist at all.The boy is used to the library being a place where he can find the answers to his questions.Mi primer acercamiento a Murakami no ha sido positivo, espero tener más suerte en próximas ocasiones. If you are someone who has been waiting to start reading a book by Murakami but is perplexed by the sheer size of his works like 1Q84 and Killing Commendatore, this will be a good choice. Even though the writing and narration style is a little different compared to the usual style of Murakami, this will still be a good choice to start reading him if you don't like reading bigger books as it is comparatively smaller in size compared to his other works. In terms of the afterlife of the story, of its ability to linger over your mind and stay with you, this is quite potent. I read this last night and it has played on my mind ever since because it leaves you with questions. Again, like the writing of Kafka, nothing is particularly clear. It challenges you to imagine and fill in the gaps: it makes you wonder what the situation actually is beyond the surface of the writing. A boy visits his local library on the way home from school. When he asks to borrow a book, he is directed to Room 107 in the basement where a stern old man confronts him. Fearful, the boy says he is interested in tax collection in the Ottoman Empire and the man goes to fetch three large volumes. It is hard to tell what the moral of this strange tale is. It could be that: "Curiousity and the thirst for knowledge can land you in some difficult places". However, I had a feeling the book made a strong point of not giving in to submission when confronted with strangers.

Murakami turns the expected on its head. In The Strange Library he channels the spirit of Kafka, creating a nightmarish situation of entrapment, despair and freakishness. A boy goes to the library. He wishes to learn more about the Ottaman Empire but instead finds himself trapped by an unusual old man. He forces the boy to read three books and will only allow him to leave if he can recite them word for word. No easy task. He gets to read the books, but hardly under conditions he could have anticipated; despite the circumstances (and some rather unpleasant pressure put on him to get the most out of the books) reading, too, becomes an entirely new experience: From cover to cover, Kidd’s illustrations, which comprise almost half the book, threaten to overwhelm Murakami’s text. The images respond to events in the story, but they aren’t literal depictions of scenes. Kidd takes an impressionistic approach, echoing the brooding atmosphere of the boy’s imprisonment and escape from the labyrinth. The illustrations overlap and compound, sometimes grainy, often magnified, always too close for comfort—insect-patterned paper and an origami bird, a leering moon and a sugary doughnut, obscured faces and staring eyes. The effect is disorienting, hypnotic and—dare I say?—dreamlike. You don’t read this book so much as you feel it. The Strange Library, a novella by Haruki Murakami with illustrations by Chip Kidd, is an odd, beautiful little book. It tells the story of a lonely, unnamed boy who finds himself imprisoned in a labyrinth beneath a library. The boy’s captor is an old librarian who wants to eat his brains—but only after the boy has memorized the contents of three obscure and weighty tomes on the subject of tax collection in the Ottoman Empire. Two other characters are trapped in the labyrinth with the boy: one is a man dressed in a sheepskin, who makes the best fried doughnuts the boy has ever tasted, and the other is a mysterious, beautiful girl, who can’t speak and who may or may not exist, but who does her best to help the boy make sense of his predicament.I just hope this book doesn't put anyone off seeking knowledge, either in general, or by visiting their local library. It has that effect on the narrator, but that is partly because the punishment prescribed for him failing to acquire specific knowledge in a limited time was so grim - yet also somewhat clichéd.

Yes," I replied. "The Sheep Man featured in it. I am sure he was in another of Murakami's that I have read. Was it 'Dance, Dance, Dance'?" The story is a fairly simple fable: a boy goes to the public library because he was idly wondering about the Ottoman tax collection system, and his mother always said, "If you don't know something, go to the library to look it up". He knows the place well, but on this occasion, he's sent to a reading room, via an enormous underground labyrinth, escorted by a sinister old man. It's not just the corridors that take a worrying turn, and he tries to quell his fears by rationalising the improbability of a public body being able to afford so much secret space. Is it magical, a hallucination, real in a parallel world? Will he live or die? Well, I guess so. It was neat and wrapped up. It was still suitably ambigious enough for a Murakami story though. The whole thing was only a short story of his. It was padded out by the illustrations. And it was nothing new from Murakami. More of the same really. But I did love the library and the idea of it's hidden side." Little kids love being scared out of their pants, right? I remember I loved those un-Bowdlerized Grimm tales with wolves wolfing down your granny and little kids thrown into the oven for dinner. Our unnmaed narrator has his own share of terror in the maze-like corridors of the library:Murakami’s plot might seem a gross-out, but the story is amusing enough for 10-to-13-year-olds and sufficiently resonant to appeal to adults with an affinity for fantasy. (...) Murakami does lapse into bouts of over-playfulness, but whether he is writing for adults or children, he remains a suspenseful and fantastical storyteller." - Joseph Peschel, The Washington Post Brendon, I am quite aware of that fact. You have yet to finish Century Rain. But you are close to finishing and I wanted to make you a proposal. I would like you to come to our laboratory and read Murakami's new novel in our new instrument. Doctors Sato and Kato have been working very hard on getting it ready. And we would compensate you for your time of course." The library's labyrinthine structure is a nod to Jorge Luis Borges' The Library of Babel. Labyrinths were a common theme of Borges' work. The manner in which the protagonist is imprisoned is reminiscent of Franz Kafka's The Trial. As it happens, Kafka is a regular feature in Murakami's work and hard-coded influence in his writing. In Camera Lucida Roland Barthes discovers his mother not in pictures of her as an adult, but in a photograph taken of her when she was a child. Does the narrator of The Strange Library find his mother in the ghostly girl? The old man then leads him into a subterranean maze towards the reading room where he will be permitted to read the books. There the boy meets a sheep man who imprisons him in a cell. He is told that he has one month to memorise all three volumes, after which the old man intends to eat his brains once they have become ‘nice and creamy’ with knowledge.