The Strange Library

Being a fan of children's literature, this story really left me wanting more. Some of my fondest childhood memories are of my local library and my favourite librarian Rosemary.This story reminds me of old Grimm fairy tales,with children in mortal danger from cannibalistic magical beings, and nightmares brought to life. My only complaint would be that it is all too short.Just when it started getting good, it was over.The illustrations were beautiful, but the imagery from the story itself made my imagination go full throttle. Really enjoyable.

It's like "The Emperor's New Clothes" - everybody says Murakami is one of the best living authors and he evidently wrote "The Strange Library" but unless it was supposed to be for children, I can't say that I'd put in my top ten- not for the last 50, 40, 20 years not even for December 2014. Maybe it's like a Picasso joke. I remember how he took a bunch of ordinary dinner plates, signed them and he could sell each one for thousands of dollars. Just because they were signed by Pablo Picasso.

The kindle edition of this book was okay- and I like Murakami's prose, but if you would like something that showcases the thought that went into the design of this book and to get a better experience- buy the print edition. The cover opens vertically and just about every page has a photo illustration that the e-edition does not accurately capture. It's a beautifully designed and written little story but I think the physical edition conveys what Murakami and the designer were attempting to convey.

This is a lyrical but scary story. Was the boy's experience real? If not, how did he lose his shoes? Why does his mother seem so indifferent when he returns? Perhaps, because none of this happened. The story is part ''wild things'' and part Camus' ''The Stranger.'' In a way I was disappointed that Murakarmi hadn't turned this story into something longer and more substantial.

Classic Murakami - a 1985 short story, translated to English and repackaged in 2014. Short and sweet with the return of the Sheep Man who saw his last appearance in Dance, Dance, Dance, the last of the Trilogy of the Rat. Enchanting and brilliant, this is not the children's book it seems to be at first glance, but rather a deep allegory for adults to spend time with. The illustrations emphasize key points in the writing, all of which is very detailed and forward.

Kudos Murakami!

Like every work by Murakami y enjoy each word and imagine all his different worlds. But.......it is to short a story. It makes me want more and more.
Hopefully, he will write again. Longer, I expect.

Very, very disappointing from Murakami!
It is extremely short, 20 minutes to read, but most disappointing is the dumbed down language and complete lack of imagination in the writing.
It's a nice whacky little idea, but so poorly put across that it sounds like a story I tell my kids at bed time making it up as I go along to keep it short and get them to sleep!
Nicely presently book with cool illustrations - a very dark children's book, so should be marketed as such so adults don't waste their money!

This novella is the first Haruki Murakami work I've read. I expected creatively imagined weirdness. Instead this book beamed me up to its bizarre alien spaceship and dropped me in an abandoned Gap clothing store. It was an interesting story but remarkably unremarkable.

This little story is certainly not worth the $10. Maybe Murakami's agent just wanted to get something out and put this out as if it were a book. I think I've read every one of his previous books but this is the first time I've really been disappointed. Even the story is not compelling.

I couldn't stop reading. It's like reading a new version of some of Grimm's stories. As a lecturer on the subject of thought experiments, I am going to enclose it as a must reading for my students. One can take it to many areas - from marriage to philosophy of science.

It will definitely give you that familiar but unexplainable feeling everytime you read a Murakami, only much briefer because the story is so short! I wish this were a novel.
What makes this book expensive I guess is the artwork that goes with it. It's beautiful and it complements the text well.

A scary tale that speaks of the scariness of living the journey life offers us. Like all good fairy tales, the symbolic draws you in while the literalness of the story pushes you away. Many morals does this story leave you with, but through the imagery it suggests, you are left with a sense of worlds beyond worlds, all up to you to create as you live a life. Realizing that living a life is a creative act with no certainties or absolutes to count on is scary business.

Liked this book a lot
Read it while it was snowing outside and felt the sound of the snow falling while moving from word to word...
Nice usage of images
Strange atmosphere inside
Has to be accompanied by steampunk music

The Strange Library is, in essence, a condensed version of all Murakami's stories. It does as a short story what it takes Murakami hundreds of pages to do in his other novels. I would have given it a five star review, but for a tiny short story with mostly pictures I don't think it's worth $7.99 for the Kindle version. Instead go to the real library and check it out. Murakami is a genius, and lots of people would pay more for this just to own a work of art. A hard copy might have made it worth it.

Rating 3.5
It turned impossible not to read this short story being a librarian and a fan of Murakami's work. Strange, beautiful and well told, as usual in author's books. I'm not sure I liked the end, maybe it was too short to me, but I enjoyed a lot of the story and I kind of fell in love with the brains-eating-librarian, I guess all librarians want to be like him at some point... Ok, perhaps just without the brains eating part... Or perhaps not.

It was fabulous but ended too quickly. It's beautifully illustrated so be sure to either buy the physical book or read it on a device that shows color. Now I'm waiting for the next Haruki Murakami mind-blowing extravaganza!

One of Murakami's first short stories. Themes begin that recur in later works. A mysterious sheep man, a girl with no voice, incarceration, a maze, dreams, suspended belief, unexplained loss, and release. What a marvelous mind.

I am a fan of Haruki Murakami. But this book was too short, and so it seems expensive compared to his other ebooks. Story of the book seems like the ones found in the works by Shinichi Hoshi or Kenji Miyazawa (famous Japanese novelists). Slightly disappointed.

This is a good example of what can be done do lure people into buying printed books.

I read both e-books and in paper (for some reason I have two kindles for myself + the tablets, iPods and phones) but I have been buying printed books when the design offers things the e-version cannot.

This version has a foldable cover, the font (or typeface, sorry) resembles the result of using a typewriter, it use illustrations to accompany the story (some people might not like that it does not allow to completely recreate the written word according to their imagination) and different colors for the dialogue of different characters.

It is actually very short and it would fit in several of the tale collections of Murakami, the main call are the designs of Chip Kidd, some people might not like that he tries to make them look japanese.

I have read every Murakami novel that was translated into English. I was enthralled by every single one of them. Then came "The Strange Library". I have never been disappointed by my favorite Japanese author as I was with this 'book'. Short, outlandish, almost to the point of having no reason to have been written.
If you are a fan of Murakami, as I am, you will be terribly disappointed by this feeble attempt. Do not waste money on this.

"The Strange Library" opens up like an episode of Rod Serling's 1960's suspense series "The Twilight Zone." A young boy innocently walks into a library to borrow books about how taxes were collecting during the Ottoman Empire. He chooses this unusual subject matter because his mother has always told him that if you don't know something, you should go to the library and look it up. The librarian directs him downstairs to a creepy basement where he makes his request to a cantankerous old man who has black spots all over his face that look like flies. The boy immediately changes his mind because he doesn't want to stay in this scary room with this bizarre man for another second. But the man gets angry and accuses the boy of playing games with him. I laughed out loud when the man comes back with the books and says: "Feast your eyes on these" and "An impressive collection, you must admit" because who on earth would find tax collection so fascinating? The boy prepares to leave with the books, but the man stops him and says that in THIS library, you can't take the books home. Instead, you must read them in a particular room in the library. He leads the boy through a maze of hallways until they finally enter a door that says "Reading Room." Inside, it's pitch black, and when the boy comments about this to the man, curious as to how he could possibly read in complete darkness, the man angrily answers, "Are you the sort of boy who finds fault with every little thing, however trivial?" I laughed even harder when I read this, but unfortunately, this was the last opportunity to laugh during this story.

I won't give away the whole plot, as this is a very short book where each page of text is accompanied by a picture. There are colorful and odd drawings, and my favorite is the extreme close-up of half of a glazed doughnut. Turns out that the Reading Room is a prison cell that the boy must escape from with the help of a Sheep Man and a delicate mute girl who he's never quite sure actually exists or if she's a dream or a figment of his imagination. She is the only glimmer of hope in the story. She doesn't speak with her voice, only with her hands, and I like the way all her dialogue is printed in light blue ink which contrasts with the rest of the words in black type. She brings him a hot meal which includes piping hot soup and white asparagus. She talks about the moon and tells the boy she will help him and the Sheep Man escape, but she will have to join them later because she has become robbed of strength from the moon. However, she assures the boy that the moon won't affect him or the Sheep Man.

Overall, I found The Strange Library to be a downer, and I'd wished it had contained more of the sarcastic humor that it began with. However, the story did paint a unique imagery that kept me wanting to read. In addition to despair, I felt the entire book was symbolic of the most extreme loneliness a person can experience and that being devoid of companionship is far worse than being stripped of your freedom in a locked prison cell.

If I said, "Strange doesn't begin to cover it," I could probably just stop.  This is easily one of the most bizarre things I've read in yonks, a nightmarish fairytale about a boy who just wants to read about tax collection in the Ottoman empire.  Yes, it's strange from the get-go.

The boy goes to his local library to return books about building a ship and... something else equally odd and not particularly interesting, and the librarian, who would rather read than deal with him, tells him if he wants more books he need to go to room 107 in the basement.  There he finds an old man who rustles up not one but three books on Ottoman tax collecting, and then tells the boy they have to be read in the library.

The boy doesn't want to stay.  It's late and his mother worries, but he's a polite boy and agrees to read for 30 minutes.  The librarian leads him through a maze to a cell where he's told that if he's memorized the three huge books in the course of a month, he'll be set free.  He's put in the charge of a man in a sheep costume, fed well, and told that at the end of the month, the old man is going to eat his brains.

At this point I was pretty well committed to the story so I read on to find out whether the cannibal-librarian would have his meal, or whether the boy would get away, and who is the man dressed like a sheep and the girl who brings the boy food, but who everyone else says doesn't exist?

And I still have no idea what actually happened.  I mean, I know what the book says happened, but I don't really understand it at a visceral level except as a fairytale that doesn't seem to make any sense.  To be fair, I find a lot of fairytales from outside the most familiar cultures make little sense to me, and this is more alien than I'm used to.  I enjoyed it, but I'm not sure I'll ever be clear on why.

Possibly it's something to do with the illustrations which look like bits of Asian advertising art from the mid-20th century.  In fact, I couldn't help but wonder if Murakami began with these images and rearranged them until a story began to form in his mind.  That would make as much sense as anything else.

The Strange Library is short, oblique, perturbing, scary, and funny.  I found myself laughing over the most awful things, or muttering "What?" and "Oh come on!" but I finished it with a sense that I wanted to read more Murakami.  

In 2014, Murakami fans were graced with not one new book, but two! The Strange Library is really a novella, but quite different from anything he’s done before as far as format. The story itself is strange, which is a word I use a lot when describing Murakami’s stories, but it’s strange and mysterious in a good way.

The story is about a boy, imprisoned in a library. Not a normal library. A (wait for it) STRANGE library. This one has winding corridors, hidden rooms and a really strange guy dressed up like a sheep. While reading this part, I could not help but be reminded of another book by Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase. Ah, such memories.

The book comes shrink-wrapped and once opened, you must fold out flaps to get to its contents. It’s a strange design but kind of neat at the same time. The book is short (96 pages) and contains a lot of graphics to support the story visually. The pages are thick, very substantial. While reading, you feel as if you are holding something really special. I’m not sure you’d have the same feeling while reading an ebook version or listening to it on audio. Chip Kidd designed the book. He’s done some work for Murakami before. I really like what he does. If you are at all interested in book design, check out his Ted Talk. He’s quite a character!

Back to the book.

As a Murakami, there are a lot of familiar elements. If you handed this story to me on plain paper and left the author’s name off of it, I’d still be able to tell who wrote it but it’s just a small taste of what he can do. I liked the story a lot but I wanted to spend more time with it. I ripped that puppy open and before I knew it, the story was over.

It. Was. Too. Brief.

That is my one criticism.

But, it looks lovely on my shelf. Just lovely. Have you read it or tried Murakami yet?

The book is told first person perspective style by a young boy. Things start out with him returning some books to the library as normal given he's a fairly avid reader and was taught to utilize the library to look up things that he didn't know or understand. But while there, he decides to look into the history of tax collection in the Ottoman Empire, which is quite the obscure random topic for a boy too look into. The librarian directs him to Room 107 to find the information he is looking for.

There he meets a strange librarian who can only be described as an older balding man. He leads our protagonist deeper into the library under the guise of showing him the books that he needs, but soon the boy finds himself a prisoner of the strange librarian. The old man plans on consuming his fact-filled brain once he has completed reading three more books while he is imprisoned. Now trapped with only the Sheep Man jailer as company, our young hero needs to find a way to escape the library and get back home to his mother.

It wasn only after I had read this book that I had discovered that it was being billed as a children's novella. Given Haruki Murakami's body of work. it's not exactly easy to distinguish what makes this book more for children than for older readers apart from the relative brevity of the story and of course the fact that it contains no adult themes like sex and drinking. Instead we have a rather chilling tale that feels a bit more like something Neil Gaiman would create.

Then again, Murakami's novels are known for their imagery and their surrealist themes at times and thus this book sort of fits in with the rest of his fictional universe. And the inclusion of the Sheep Man, who is a recurring character across a number of his novels, was a truly surprise inclusion in this story. In other stories he was typically a sort of enigmatic guide that helps various protagonists. In this case, he too is a prisoner of sorts, forced to work for our cruel librarian. It was a shame that he was limited in this manner, but then it was still nice to "see" him again since we haven't really heard from him since books like Dance, Dance, Dance.

Given all this, the book remains to be quite the gripping tale, and the addition of the pop art style images only adds to the flavor of the book. At times the images seem merely illustrative - adapting themes of the story itself. But more often than not, the images seem a little creepy as they act as distorted representations of elements of the story as you go through.

I'm not quite sure if I would recommend this book for children, but then again we shouldn't sell kids short. It's quite the fascinating tale that could act as a modern fairy tale of sorts and it still features a young hero doing his best to save himself. And while he has help along the way, you're never really sure if it's enough to help him escape the labyrinth of the library and the librarian that holds him prisoner.

The Strange Library is a lovely Murakami experience that is beautiful both in terms of its words and the way the book was put together. It's a story that works for readers of most ages, provided you don't mind getting a little scared along the way.

I first ventured into the bizarre world of Haruki Murakami’s fiction, reading Norwegian Wood in the aptly named class called "Sex, Love, and Deception: an Introduction to Japanese Literature in Translation." There are lots of common themes in Murakami’s writing, loneliness chief among them. But, while his writing is sometimes tragic, it doesn’t come across as completely depressing. His books often have a dreamlike cast and surrealistic bent. They’re weird in the best possible way. (If you haven’t read any of Murakami’s stuff, his short fiction is frequently published in The New Yorker, and you can get a taste of it on their website. His most recent short story, “Kino,” about a man who opens a hole-in-the-wall bar in the Aoyama neighborhood of Tokyo and his strange regular customer, was just published on February 23.)

Weirdness, of course, leads to strong opinions. So, it’s no surprise that Murakami has an avid, cult-like fan base. His Facebook page boasts over 1,000,000 likes. There’s an unofficial fan blog on Tumblr that is chock-full of Murakami pictures, quotations, news, and other content. There are over 2,500 in Goodreads’ Haruki Murakami Fans Group. There’s even an annual gathering of die-hard Murakami fans at a Hokkaido sheep farm. Fans post list after list after list of books you should read “if you really really like Haruki Murakami’s books.” I’ve never been stopped at the library by a stranger to discuss my choice of reading material before . . . but when I was walking out of the library carrying this book, a Murakami fan stopped me to ask whether I had read his newest short story in The New Yorker. These fans are no joke.

But I can’t blame them. It’s hard not to like his stuff. And his latest book, The Strange Library, reminds me why I like his writing so much.

The Strange LIbrary begins with a kid returning some books at his local public library. While he’s there, he wants to check out a book or two about tax collection during the Ottoman Empire. He is sent to Room 107, a mysterious section of the basement he never knew existed. He opens the door to the room and finds a librarian: "A little old man sat behind a little old desk in the middle of the room. Tiny black spots dotted his face like a swarm of flies. The old man was bald and wore glasses with thick lenses. His baldness looked incomplete; he had frizzy white hairs plastered against both sides of his head. It looked like a mountain after a big forest fire."

The man retrieves three books on Ottoman tax collection from the stacks, but they are marked with “For Internal Use Only” stickers. He tells the kid that he will have to stay in the library and read them in the Reading Room. Reluctantly, the kid agrees (despite the fact that he knows his mother will worry if he is gone too long).

The old man escorts the kid to the Reading Room through a series of maze-like corridors: "My mind was in turmoil. It was too weird—how could our city library have such an enormous labyrinth in its basement. I mean, public libraries like this one were always short of money, so building even the tiniest of labyrinths had to be beyond their means."

Finally, they are greeted behind a locked door by a nice man dressed in a costume made entirely of real sheepskin, who guides them the rest of the way to the Reading Room. In a shocking turn of events, the Reading Room is not what the kid expected.

This is classic Murakami. That is to say, it is weird (and a little creepy) in the best possible way. It reads like the telling of an incredibly bizarre, fascinating, and detailed dream (you can inexplicably read Turkish, you understand the beautiful girl who speaks only with her hands, there’s a man in a sheep costume who seems totally normal). Each character has a distinctive, funny, realistic voice. The ending is sad and unexpected (and loneliness rears its ugly head). This novella exemplifies everything people love about Murakami.

But the book itself defies characterization. It’s the length of a longish short story (96 pages of large print). The cover flaps unfold (top and bottom) to reveal the first page of text beneath (in a nice touch, the spine boasts the markings “FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY”). Almost every spread consists of a trippy illustration (by Chip Kidd) on one side (usually very clearly but abstractly related to the text) with corresponding text on the other side.

If you haven’t read any of Murakami’s books, this is a great place to start. It is his typical fare, made even more surreal with colorful, quirky illustrations. And you can devour it easily in one quick sitting. It’s fun and weird and sad and utterly unique.

At 76 pages, The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami may be the smallest book I've read in my adult life, though it's a deceptive little thing. First of all, it presents as a children's book, complete with a stamped library card attached to the front cover. Inside, there are whimsical illustrations on each page. Who is this book aimed at? It's too dark for children and too random for the YA market. Instead, this is an erudite fairytale for adults..but be warned. It could be just about the weirdest book you'll ever read.

The plot!

A polite young boy goes to the library to return some books. Whilst there, he asks the librarian if they have any books on how tax was collected during the Ottoman Empire. He's directed to a special room where a scary old man resides. Before long, he's imprisoned in a cage in the bowels of the library by a sheep-man, and told that the old man wants to eat his brain after feeding it three large tomes. Resigned to his fate, the boy starts reading the books whilst the sheep-man brings him doughnuts. A very pretty girl appears before him and slips through the bars of his cage to bring him delicacies. Together, these two odd creatures endeavour to help the boy escape the old man.

If nothing else, you've got to commend Murakami for a pretty ballsy narrative. The sheer WTFery of this story alone makes it worth reading. What is it really about? Ah, but there's the question. It's more about the journey, and the journey is but a dream. If you discover something profound within its pages, then you're probably correct. Is the author trying to warn children away from libraries? That would be so self-defeating that it's actually a possibility in Murakaimi's wild universe. I personally have no idea what to glean from this book. It certainly held my interest, and I enjoyed the interplay of the words with the illustrations. I felt like a kid again as I read and poured over the drawings, and that was a marvellous feeling. We create our own strange library when our imaginations run wild, and perhaps that's the real gift that Murakami is giving us.

A twenty minute to half hour read at most, it's an interesting little book that isn't just a short story as the illustrations which the story diverts it telling through at times make it an interesting read. However being an interesting read doesn't necessarily make a great read, Basically this one is like a kid whose gotten high on some sort of substance and imagines he's journeyed to his local library, but there is a room that wasn't there before where he meets a mean old man (staff member) who bullies him into reading three books he didn't really want in the first place rather than go home. (Overall situation spoilers) He bullies him through a maze of corridors and through a door into darkness into a basement the narrator kid can't fathom how is possible to exist and hears the door lock behind him. Once in the dark he encounters another old man who is accompanied by a sheep man, this old man tells him he has to read and absorb the knowledge on every page of the three books before he can go home and places him in the reading room which resembles a prison cell. The sheep man confides in him that the old man wants to eat his brain once it is plump with knowledge. There's also a mute beautiful girl who brings him his food. Will the kid escape and get back to his mother before she gets mad at him for missing dinner?

It's definitely worth borrowing from your actual public library but wether it's something you'd want to pay money to own would be down to how much this sort of thing interests you, so I'd recommend borrowing it first.

If you know anything about the fiction of Murakami, you probably know that it's highly likely to be fantastical, if not downright surreal. This short story/novella definitely fits that criteria -- perhaps too much so. The reader will follow a boy down the rabbit-hole of a maze beneath his local library, into a realm populated by a donut-making sheepman and a beautiful ghost-girl. There's no particular sense to be made of this -- it's much more mood than story, and for me, that's not enough. Indeed, the only real reason I could recommend picking this up is if you are literally picking up a physical copy of the paperback. Designed by the rockstar of book designers, Chip Kidd, the book is much more interesting as a design object than the sum of its words. Hard to imagine the digital version being anywhere near as striking.

This is basically a short-story reshaped to fit into a 90 page book by using a large typeface and dozens of strange illustrations. In a lot of ways, it feels like it was written for children, though I’m not sure if that’s really the case. A child certainly couldn’t appreciate the more subtler aspects of this book’s design (like the cover, which is built from flaps(?) and the drawings inside which were like abstract interpretations of the text). The story itself was brisk and engaging, but really only had enough space to scratch the surface of any deeper ideas Murakami was trying to explore. A quick read (took me about 45 minutes to go from cover to cover) that I found to be a pleasant experience.

Despite other reviews, I enjoyed this book very much. Yes, it is a very small book, and an even shorter story with pages filled with illustrations, but I thought it was a really good concept for a story. It doesn't take more than 30 minutes to read, tops, but it did leave me wondering and thinking about what happened, trying to figure out what it all means.

I admit this is only my second Murakami book - the first being Norwegian Wood, which is one of my top favourite books of all time. So this is drastically different than his usual style of writing, but it doesn't take anything away from the story itself. You may think of it as a children's fable, or a graphic novel even, whatever you want to categorize it as, it remains a good, solid story.

I'm still confused about how it all ended though.

Equal credit for this small book should be given to designer Chip Kidd as to author Haruki Murakami (and his translator Ted Goosen). The actual story (a mere 7,500 words or so) is charming but slight, a nightmare fantasy about a boy who gets imprisoned in a cell deep in the basement of a public library by an old man with Hannibal Lechter appetites. What makes it special is the physical design of the book itself, Kidd's work, rather than Murakami's. Opening in an unusual way, like a Japanese notebook, with cover flaps that fold up and down, it presents itself as a block of color prints, almost as many pages as the story itself, which is printed in large typewriter font interleaving the illustrations. These are in full color, modern yet with an old-fashioned air at the same time, in a similar style to the covers of many of Murakami's books. At any rate, the combination of text and illustration kept me happily engaged for the half-hour it took to read this, and I could imagine keeping it on my coffee table for a month or two to show my friends. But it is a work of negligible substance, that will offer little to serious followers of Murakami's novels.

Tailwinds Press Review. See us at www.tailwindspress.com

Murakami and the Need for the Strange

In more ways than one, it’s barely worth reviewing. Insofar as Murakami qua international superstar can actually be reviewed, the text of The Strange Library is about 26 pages long, interspersed with a cryptic, sometimes grotesque mixture of Eastern-inflected pop art, and printed in what looks to be a strapping 18-point double-spaced Courier. The Strange Library is not exactly a book, just as the library in the title is not exactly a library. In the opening pages, the young nameless narrator asks frivolously for a volume on taxation in the Ottoman Empire; this mysteriously triggers a nasty ordeal in which he’s lured into a musty basement and imprisoned for three days by a deranged elderly man who openly plans to “eat his brains.” Murakami’s newest artifact is a vicious takedown of the linguistic enterprise—an unholy subversion of the heavenlier-than-thou Borgesian library, a small furious screed on how language is complicit in violence and betrayal.
The Strange Library is of average Murakami weirdness, but unusually bleak. In the standard boy-wanders-into-dark-mansion narrative, the child has usually done something immoral or unwise; one of the most disturbing elements of The Strange Library is that the Boy appears to be guilty of nothing more than a socially upstanding (if casual) desire to read an educational book. The narrator’s jailer gleefully uses speech to abuse the core features of culture and civilization: he bullies and guilts (“The real question is, do you value my assistance or not? Why do you think I lugged these three heavy books out here? For my health?”) while taking advantage of shy politeness (the narrator wonders, “Why do I act like this, agreeing when I really disagree, letting people force me to do things I don’t want to do?”). Also, he lies. He tells the Boy that he is being taken to a reading room, then locks him up and threatens to eat his brains unless he memorizes a treatise on Ottoman empire taxation in three days. Later on the old man admits that he was going to eat the narrator’s brains in any event; sustained study and learning will simply make his brains “creamier.”
During his three-day imprisonment, the narrator is separately visited by a beautiful telepathic girl and a sad-sack man in the sheep suit, neither of whom are obviously truth-functional. The sheep man initially denies having seen the girl, while the girl suggests that she and the sheep man inhabit parallel universes (“The sheep man has his world. I have mine. And you have yours, too.”). In the Murakami universe, this passes for a perfectly rational, even banal explanation—until the sheep man later claims to have seen the girl after all: “I passed some girl in the corridor a minute ago, and she told me. Said we were both leaving together.” Both are consciously or unwittingly treacherous. The sheep man claims to know of an escape route, but leads himself and the Boy straight into a trap. The beautiful girl—who may or may not be the Boy’s pet starling—repeatedly promises that he will see her in the outside world, but she never materializes. When he finally returns from the library, his bird is inexplicably missing.
It is unusually evident that, even within the construct of a surreally menacing universe, the events in The Strange Library are taking place in a dream. The basement dungeon of the library strikes the Boy as deeply illogical even as he lives in it, particularly as “public libraries like this one were always short of money.” Typical of a dream sequence, during his imprisonment the Boy has a hallucinatory experience of reading a book in an unknown language: “The book was written in classical Turkish; yet, strangely, I found it easy to understand. Not only that, but each page stuck in my memory, word for word.” As he reads, he segues into a secondary dream of actually being a Turkish tax collector named Ibn Armut Hasir, “who walked the streets of Istanbul with a scimitar at his waist, collecting taxes.” Yet when he finally escapes from the library dungeon with the sheep man, there is no cathartic wake-up scene:
“My mother had set a hot breakfast on the table and was waiting for me when I got home. She didn’t ask me a thing. Not about why I hadn’t come home from school, or where I had spent the last three nights, or why I was shoeless—not a single question or complaint….My pet starling was gone.”
In the epilogue, we find the Boy, perhaps grown up, noting that his mother has just died “from a mysterious illness.” The Strange Library is a nightmare without an end.
There are two different ways of trying to decode the juxtaposed themes of truth-functional speech and the open-ended dreaming. First, you can argue that a world in which speech is unreliable is nothing more than a disordered nightmare transposed into waking life. So far, so good—if, like the parallel-worlds theme, slightly banal. But what if we were to view linguistic instability as a result of the Boy’s chaotic and empty world, instead of its cause? Could it be that, in a Twin Peaks world where the fantastic world of subterranean fear and desire blends effortlessly with mundane everyday life, there’s no room for meaningful language? From a quasi-Lacanian perspective, if the dreamlike and surreal life already exists side by side with reality, there’s no need for language at all. It’s worth noting that there appears to be no fiction in the strange library. Immediately before asking for a book about Ottoman empire tax collections, the Boy was reading “How to Build a Submarine” and “Memoirs of a Shepherd”—books that are barely conceivable, as they relate, respectively, to (1) complex spatial designs and (2) silence.
The Strange Library is therefore an explanation of sorts for Murakami’s consistently dreamlike spaces. If we do not dream, we cannot speak. This is not necessarily because there is anything superior about the inner world: the space that Murakami privileges is the liminal world between the inner and outer worlds. In this rarified band, fragile as the starling, are language and civilization.

With the help of two Murakami stock characters—a beautiful girl who is also the narrator’s pet starling, and a sad-sack man in a sheep suit who loves fried doughnuts—the narrator eventually escapes. The epilogue, however, reveals that
Twenty-six pages, even of ultra-sturdy cardstock, doesn’t get the book to the thickness needed for a spine. Possibly to this end, the text is. Murakami, at least to a Western audience, doesn’t easily connect to popism: we like to think that he’s elegantly postmodern and macabre while retaining a certain nonironic and heartfelt warmth. Murakami’s novels, like Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or Kafka on the Shore, generally have conventionally positive Hollywood endings; even in his less traditional short stories, as in After the Quake, there is a focus on the comforts of the sublime.
The rest of the text addresses the narrator’s ordeal and inevitable escape. Not that the ending is particularly happy, for the narrator (the Boy), as an adult, is consumed with loneliness: “My mother died last Tuesday…There was a simple funeral, and now I am totally alone…I lie here by myself in the dark at two o’clock in the morning and think about that cell in the library basement.”

Murakami's The Strange Library is a quick trip into a world of despair, grief, and pain. A young boy is locked in a mysterious library by an old man who feeds on brains and his guard, a sheep man. The spare writing is structured in a puzzle of a book cover, and the pages are interspersed with dark, intricate images laid out in a disorienting design. Along with the uttering bewildering narrative, this book creates an intense and disturbing feeling of confusion and misery, just as many of Murakami's longer works do. Although very brief, this novel, particularly the last page, punched me with an emotional intensity unlike any I've felt while reading a short story. Somehow, through Murakami's strange, mysterious, and very short novel, by the end, you are brought to the deepest point of despair. This short story/very brief novella is a good addition to fans of Murakami, although don't read it expecting for pleasure - read it for a swift half-hour journey into the darkest and most disturbing corner of grief and loneliness.

I love mysterious, weird, allegorical stories like this one. After I read this, I spent days wondering what it all really meant, what each character represented, and reading reviews where others tried to do the same. The Sheep Man in particular was one of my favorite characters, and for some reason reminded me of Mr. Tumnus from the Narnia books.

I was a little underwhelmed, however, with the pictures included in this book and how they integrated into the story. I was expecting something a bit more fantastical, and I think that the author could have done some really fun and interesting things to enhance the reading experience.

As weird as this story was, I have to say that I will most assuredly think of it each and every time I enter a library now, whether I want to or not. If you like strange, allegorical stories you should go pick up a copy of "The Strange Library". It is sure to make you think and leave you wondering long after the last page has turned.

The first thing you notice about The Strange Library is that it's strange itself, opening from top to bottom on the cover as if you are unclasping a secret file. Then you see the images and text on each page, working together to move through Murakami's interesting narrative.

There are other books that this one reminds me of. Here I'm thinking of Aeon Flux: The Herodotus File, and also the Codex Espangliensis: From Columbus to the Border Patrol. You can find both of those on the store, and both books are cool because you "read" them kind of like a researcher or PI digging through a file of materials.

Murakami's cover reads, along the spine "For Internal Use Only," and this very short novel is a slowly unfolding mystery of sorts, exhuming childhood memories in the mode of magical realism. If you're into physically interesting books (don't get the Kindle version!) and/or Murakami, you'll enjoy this book.

Just read this book and I have to say: rent it from your library LOL It's a short story masqueraded as a book....it was fun to read, QUICK to read, and very good (interesting thought points....the ending is odd, so you have to really think what it means). But I would not pay $10 for this. I do like how interactive it is though, very unique binding. I feel bad some people didn't like it, but I enjoy these short types of books to read out loud when in the car or when we have downtime in our house. My boys are teens and all of us (including hubby and I) enjoyed this book :)

I picked this book because I love libraries and stories that are weird. This one has both things combined: a very odd library with a very cruel keeper of the books. Although this was a short read, it was rich with words and descriptions. I love Murakami's writing style; it's ethereal in a way and quite light. Coupling that with strange, creepy, and mystical happenings makes for a really good story.

Being a fan of many of Murakami's novels and short stories, I expected more from this. The story reads as if it's written for children: the language is quite plain, the plot as complex as a comic strip, and the whole book takes much less than an hour to read. However, the conclusion is not one I'd want to pass on to any child I know. The result is that the book doesn't seem right for anyone. It's too juvenile for an adult reader and too warped and disturbing for me to feel comfortable passing it on to children. I really wish I could say it was great, but it isn't up to the standard I've come to expect from Murakami. I should also add that it's filled with pictures, none of which add to the story in any way.

A delightful little book for anyone who loves libraries and who's ever fantasised about staying on after closing hours and perhaps visiting a hidden basement or unknown reading room. Murakami keeps his bizarre and dreamlike narrative simple and yet horrifyingly fascinating, as a young boy finds himself with a strange little old man in Room 107 of the local library who insists he must go to the reading room to read his books when the library is almost closing... Saying any more gives the story away, but it suffices to say that Murakami fans would find familiar features like the detailed description of delectable food, as well as the by-now iconic mysterious pretty girl with long straight hair that shines as if there were jewels in it, even in this slim volume. The pictures also add to the visual enjoyment, and serves as an interesting counterpoint to the narrative.

I read this story, and enjoyed it well enough, but I don't think I was quite prepared for it. At any rate, I was not fully pulled into the experience of the characters. I wasn't much moved. Having said that, as the story unwound I was surprised to find it important that the narrator escaped his dilemma. I was pulling hard for him. That was yesterday. Since then, the book has already faded for me. I may have to come back to it another time when I am more open to the experience.
I've since started Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki. The flat, befuddled, emotionally unskilled tone reminds me a bit of Hemmingway. This one feels much more direct and powerful. So, maybe I just have to immerse myself in Murakami for a while.

Review originally posted at: http://www.deaddogblues.com

The Strange Library was indeed a strange book.

This was my first introduction to Haruki Murakami, although others had pushed me towards The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Norwegian Wood, and Kafka By the Shore as better first novels when approaching the author. I was more drawn to Wind/Pinball as a first introduction, but The Strange Library was far shorter than any of those and it kept looking at me. Those eyes were staring, begging me to open the book and the design of the book itself was rather compelling so I took the dive.

At 96 pages, this is more of a short-story than anything else. Half or more of the pages are illustrations, beautifully rendered, adding a surrealistic slant to book that is already mired in surrealism. Each and every turn of the page draws the eye towards the strange illustrations and gives the mind of brief tap towards what’s coming next. The black dog of depression, eye gleaming with a starburst of a pupil and a haunting snarl? A strange pattern that draws the eye downward, pushing the reader further into the basement of the strange library itself? A two page spread with a blue bird shooting across the page, upward, towards freedom and some peace of mind? You never know, which is part of the draw of the book itself. It’s not so much a rollercoaster as it is a jarring shove into this different world, violent and jerky. You lose your footing, and never quite regain it, until the sobering last page – absent from all illustration save for the endpaper. Welcome to Haruki Murakami, I suppose.

I was reluctant to review this book at first. I read through it in less than an hour, a single sitting, and was left so out of sorts by it that I wasn’t quite certain what to make of it – much less what I read. I went so far as to contact a few of my friends to see if they’d read it and wanted to discuss it – but none had. So I let it sit, pondering over it day after day. Now, ten days later, I’ve a notion of what I read. The strange pieces fell into place and a cohesive narrative formed through the chaos. It’s a testimony to the book and Murakami’s writing that I could sit on it for this long, that it kept coming up, that in the moments before sleep order evolved out of chaos for a brief moment and I could set to right the dreamlike quality of the narrative I read. I have my own ideas as to what happened, and I’m still quite eager to discuss them.

Haruki Murakami, from this book, comes off a bit like Jonathan Carroll, minus the shameless dream-like prose. Where Jonathan Carroll can turn a phrase that will burn into your mind and stick with you [ “Everything you want in life has teeth” ] Murakami works a more visual sort of magic. You’re stuck with the image of the sheep-man’s tail bobbing as he runs, the whip cracking across his face, the labyrinthine maze at the basement of the library. One isn’t really better than the other, just different, and Murakami’s prose may be more a product of translation or English being his second-language rather than any real fault on his part.

The Strange Library is a book that would be ruined by summary. It’s more of an experience, one that begins the moment you unfold the covering and begin reading it on the cover itself. It’s an odd book, but a good one, and I think by virtue of its strangeness and the way the plot has stayed sticky within my mind it further recommends the author. I look forward to reading more of his soon.

A boy goes to the city library to return some books he borrowed and requests some other books on the Turkish taxation system. He's taken to a room where he meets an old man who retrieves 3 large tomes on the subject but informs him that he cannot take them out but has to read them in the library. While worried that he needs to be home for dinner or his mother will worry, he's persuaded by the man to stay and read. And there begins his stay in what turns out to be a very strange and frightening library. He meets a sheep man and a girl who can't speak during his stay and what transpires is a fantastical tale that has all the hallmarks that I have come to expect from this author.

Admittedly, this four-star review is four stars in an almost screaming-and-kicking fashion, for even after reading every book of his currently available in English (except Running), his appeal to me remains somewhat mysterious. I must admit that I do hold a lot of respect for writers who complete a lot of work, even when a good portion of that work is pretty awful. 1Q84, for example, was entirely skimmable, and Colorless felt plain and just a mishmash of Murakami tropes,,,until the last quarter of the book seemed to settle into its own and finish out well.

This particular endeavor doesn't hold so much of the usual Murakami stuff (except the appearance of the sheep man), but the writing is very Murakami, which is what sometimes burns me up about the man. While he can pull off nice authority in convincing us of a girl who can't speak yet has quoted dialogue, at other times he rambles on for a few sentences to convey something that was already obvious at the end of the previous paragraph. This fable-like tale of a polite reader who ends up getting imprisoned in a secret basement of the library seems almost haphazardly weird at times, but like Colorless, Murakami pulls things off--in this case, at the very very end, which I won't spoil. Fair enough to say--don't forego the small font.

Murakami remains, to me, an enigma wrapped inside of a riddle. There seem to be a lot of elements that shouldn't work for him, but ultimately do.

A thoughtful, disciplined, lonely boy, a beautiful girl, a bird and a sheep man round out the cast of characters in The Strange Library, a short and strange novel with fewer than 100 pages.

The story begins with an unnamed boy returning his library books and looking for more books before returning home to his waiting mother and his pet bird. At the library he is directed to Room 107, located in the basement of the library, where a gruff old man answers the door and asks him what he wants. Startle by the man, the boy asks for a title that popped into his head on the way from school - "How Taxes are Collected in the Ottoman Empire", but really just anxious to get away from the old man. Unfortunately, he soon finds out that getting out of the library will not be as easy as it was to get in. Be careful what you ask for in this library, and be expected to read the books you ask for -- or else!

Mazes, locked doors, sheep-skinned man, a big angry dog, and fresh baked, delicious donuts. What is real, what is imagined? You'll have to read this one for yourself and decide.

This was a super quick listen which I enjoyed. I thought it was written more in the style of some of his earlier books. The audiobook was read by Kirby Heyborne who did a great job, but true Murakami fans may prefer to get their hands on the print edition which I understand has some amazing colorful illustrations dispersed though out the book.

I've enjoyed this author's more extended fiction work . I was drawn to read this title because of the illustrations . I did expect to have more illustrations but the writing gives us evocative imagery, if not terribly deep in scope. It's more of an atmospheric work, enjoyable and quickly over.

I read Haruki Murakami’s novel, The Strange Library, in a single sitting. I surrendered myself to Murakami’s dreamlike narrative as I followed a young boy into a library and became beguiled by everything that happened. I almost felt hypnotized by this story, and I felt as alone as the protagonist facing an odd world. Readers who enjoy novels that have an otherworldly dimension to them and who enjoy myths and fables should find pleasure from reading this short book.

Rating: Four-star (I like it)

Haruki Murakami is a wildly popular Japanese author whose work is rooted in ennui, magical realism, and American jazz.

The Strange Library is a slight but lovely book, essentially a short story padded out by Chip Kidd's constructions. Murikami went off the deep end in his last two novels; this is the sorbet course to remove the taste from your mouth. Read if you love libraries, read if you love books, and read if you love weirdness.

(Of course, if you love books and libraries, the third is almost a given…)

This novella is a brief and wondrous exploration into the wonder of the library and the mystery of a spooky librarian. In it, a young man is perilously trapped in the bowels of a library and forced to get exactly what he asked for. One of the coolest parts of the book is Knopf's printing, illustrations, and design, and the beautiful translation adds to the mystery of our main character's incarceration.

This book is deep Murakami, reflecting in words the visual world of Miyazaki. As I was reading, I was constantly reminded of Spirited Away's labyrinthine hallways, humans transposed into vicious animals, and an ever deepening dread and imprisonment.

The book is short, and I read it in two short sittings. The prose of Murakami, along with his beautiful magical realism, makes Strange Library an incredible little tale that takes you down into one of his more mystical and imaginative rabbit holes. This book is much more IQ84 than it is Norwegian, and its brief execution makes for a savory lozenge of metaphysical fairy tale.

The author goes back to a work he created in 1982, before this thing Internet took over the world, and it is remarkably apropos in an era where 140-character tweets and brief Facebook posts and Instagram pictures and captions hold sway. Not a full 9-course Japanese meal like other of his classics, this is instead a perfect small plate of sushi, exquisite, and may serve as an introduction to the master storyteller's works.

Fun short story about being trapped in an underground maze under the library.

Pitch black reading rooms, a sheep man and an ethereal beauty are all part of this quirky adventure.

It's about 96 pages with pictures throughout, so it's easily enjoyed in one sitting.

The Strange Library is strange.
The Strange Library is small.
The Strange Library is illustrated.
The Strange Library is deep.
The Strange Library is gem-like complexity.
The Strange Library is your soul, opening and closing.

screw it. just read it. it will take you less than an hour.

I am not quite sure what to make of this very short novel. It is a short story, a nightmare, an allegory of loneliness and fear, all of these things. I have never read any of Murakami's fiction though he continues to be one of the more decorated novelists of our time. Perhaps I will have to read something longer to put this into perspective because it all seemed very strange.

I am not too familiar with Haruki Murakami's work, having only read Norwegian Wood, but this was rather dry and dull throughout. The plot itself should have lent to some rather exciting and tension filled moments, but what I got was stale, flat and boring. The voice isn't particularly good and doesn't compel one to read on -- I only finished it because it was so short. The illustrations added almost nothing to the story itself nor enhanced it in any shape or form; rather, they served as abstract visual summaries of prior events. If you're new to Murakami, start off with Norwegian Wood or Wind up Girl chronicles.

It is by no means the best Murakami novel (That goes to Wind Up Bird Chronicle), or my favorite(Kafka on the Shore), but it is a succinct distillation of what makes him one of the great authors of the last 25 years, and serves as a satisfying introduction to his writing style.

I love this author and this book does not disappoint. I do wonder if reading it on my iPhone hurt the experience, but this story is so weird, yet engrossing and moving. A short story with a wide range of emotions. I'm never sure how he does it because on the surface it's completely wacky. But here I am, thinking again and again about what I just read.

I like the idea that this is a warped modern folk tale for children. But, if that were the case it would have been different. Either way, I'm sticking to that and I'm sticking to Murakami. All his works deserve attention. This one was a fun, quick read. Still deep and wild, but fast and fun. Enjoy it. Slurp it up.

This is a needlessly depressing story. I imagine he is challenging the notion because a character has valiantly withstood obstacles his life will turn out well afterwards. Algernon Blackwood's Jimbo might be the better choice. I will say the story is short and moves at a good clip.

Nice, quirky illustrated Murakami short story. If you have previous Murakami experience, you'll know what to expect. If you've never read his work before, you MAY be confused, but it's a very enjoyable story.

Nice, quirky illustrated Murakami short story. If you have previous Murakami experience, you'll know what to expect. If you've never read his work before, you MAY be confused, but it's a very enjoyable story.

This story took me 19 minutes to read and was one of the most pointless and boring stories I've ever read. I don't know what's happened with Murakami recently...his writing is getting tired and schizophrenic sounding. Colorless Tsukuru and now this!

Murakami doesn't disappoint! I loved the story and even though it was labeled as a "short story " I couldn't help wishing it was longer. Loved the inclusion of the sheep man character (maybe from Wild Sheep Chase?) Great read!

I like many of Murakami's earlier books but this is not a book. It is a short, rambling, non-sense fantasy.
A child could be more creative. It's similar to Picasso drawing a line on a canvas and trying to sell it for millions.

Is this for real? I could not believe that the store is selling this very-very short story as a book and for $10.
I like many Murakami's books, but this is not serious.
It is a fantasy story about nothing that you could read in about an hour. On my iPad it is 46 pages of actual text vs. total of 105 pages. If you want to waste $10 and 1 hour of your time, buy this book.

As the Washington Post review said, it's a "fun children’s novella"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/book-review-the-strange-library-by-haruki-murakami/2014/12/16/dbd8591e-7d6b-11e4-b821-503cc7efed9e_story.html

This is basically a short story. I know the store lists the print legnth at 88 pages, but with normal sized printing and spacing i'd guess it would be more like 12 pages long. If this was in one of his other collections of short stories, it would probably rate among the weakest in the book.
Murakami has better short stories you can read for free at the new yorker online and not have to pay 12$ to do so. not reccomended.