I’ve read several novels by this 73 old Japanese writer whose work has been translated into 50 languages.  My favorite book among them is the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and like this novella, it’s confusing, beautiful, engaging, and at the end of the day, impossible to nail down.  Is he toying with us?  Is he channeling some Japanese folk tradition that is opaque to us?  Is he the inheritor of the Western surrealistic tradition?

The ‘Strange Library’ is appropriately titled since this is a very strange book. In it, a young boy enters the city library where he is greeted by a librarian who appears to be reading the left page with her left eye and the right page with her right eye.  When he asks her for some books, she directs him to Room 107 where an even stranger little old man unlocks a metal door and takes our narrator through a labyrinth of corridors before locking him in a room where he is told to memorize three volumes about tax collection in the Ottoman Empire.  Served food by a little man in a sheepskin and a beautiful though increasingly transparent girl.  Is he dreaming?  Is the library an allegory for some obscure story?  Is there something else going on here?

Rarely do I read other reviewers work before writing my own, but I did this time, totally confused by this short book.  Here’s how the review by Alan Cheuse from NPR in December, 2014 concludes:  The mysterious pleasure of it all is the payoff when you read Murakami. Some scholar may explain it to us all one day, diagram the roots of his work in the Japanese storytelling tradition, in fable and myth, the special effects he imports from American literature. For me, now, I’m just enjoying basking in the heat of this hypnotic short work by a master who is playing a long game.

The book is beautifully illustrated in bright colors and patterns by Chip Kidd, an American graphic designer who has achieved fame through his book covers.  Interestingly, Kidd was married to J.D. McClatchy who died in 2018.  McClatchy was a well-known poet who taught at Yale, wrote wonderful books of poetry and criticism and was the literary executor for the famous American poets Anthony Hecht, Mona van Duyn, and James Merrill.  Small world.