Watch Your Head When Checking Out Murakami’s Strange ‘Library’

As if the work of Japanese fiction master Haruki Murakami weren’t strangely beautiful by itself, his American publisher has just put out a stand-alone edition of his 2008 novella The Strange Library, in a new trade paperback designed by the legendary Chip Kidd.

“The library was even more hushed than usual,” we read in the opening sentence (the entire book is set in a typeface called, appropriately, Typewriter), calling attention to the fact that we’re in for a special event. Murakami sets his story — newly translated from the Japanese by Ted Goossen — in a realm of words, an unnamed city library. An inquiring schoolboy stops by on the way home from class returns some library books (How to Build a Submarine and Memoirs of a Shepherd) and asks for reading on a subject he says has just popped into his head: Tax Collection in the Ottoman Empire.

An unfamiliar female librarian sends him down to room 107, “a creepy room” where yet another strange librarian (a bald man this time) hands him the requested volumes — then conducts him to a secret space, behind a locked door and down a hall to a labyrinth of corridors where a small man dressed in a sheepskin puts him in a cell under lock and key.

A very strange library indeed!

Full piece here:
http://www.npr.org/2014/12/02/363836249/watch-your-head-when-checking-out-murakamis-strange-library