A pair of oversized cartoon eyes dominate the front cover. But once it catches your eye, you can’t look away. On a bookstore shelf, sandwiched between the author’s more substantial works, it is easy to overlook. Designed and illustrated by Chip Kidd, it is a slim volume, just 96 pages. The spare prose, translated by Ted Goossen, stands in stark contrast to the book’s physical form, which announces its strangeness in bright colors and bold strokes. Murakami renders this heartbreaking story in a simple, unadorned style that makes even the most surreal moments feel understated. He hasn’t told anyone what happened, and he has done his best to to put the ordeal behind him, though he admits that he sometimes still thinks of it: We suspect it isn’t real, it can’t be, and the boy himself confirms our suspicions at the end, long after he has escaped from the library basement.
As in a dream, the passage of time becomes uncertain and the action unfolds in a sequence of increasingly disturbing images and events that shouldn’t hold together but somehow do. If this strikes you as the stuff of dreams-or nightmares-then you’re on the right track. 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. 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. It tells the story of a lonely, unnamed boy who finds himself imprisoned in a labyrinth beneath a library. The Strange Library, a novella by Haruki Murakami with illustrations by Chip Kidd, is an odd, beautiful little book.
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