The Strange Library

About

A boy visits a library to return some books and ask a question about tax collection in the Ottoman Empire. The old man at the desk leads him deep into the building — past shelves, down stairs, through a door that shouldn't exist — and into a nightmare. The library becomes a prison, the librarian a captor, and the boy's only allies are a sheep man and a beautiful girl who may or may not be real. Murakami's illustrated short novel is a concentrated dose of his signature uncanny — the ordinary tipping into the surreal without anyone seeming particularly surprised. The illustrations (by Chip Kidd in the US edition) give the claustrophobia a visual dimension that the prose alone only implies. A fairy tale about knowledge and captivity — where the most dangerous place in the world turns out to be the one built to hold books.