The Strange Library
by Haruki Murakami
art by Chip Kidd
translated by Ted Goosen
2014
The Strange Library is an odd little book. It's just under a hundred pages long, but the font is quite large, and every other page or so is taken up by an image, so it's somewhere between a short story and a novella. The story within is never referred to as a dream, I think most people would call it magical realism, but the events follow a dream logic, and reading it is like listening to someone describe a particularly well-remembered dream. I would not say this is Murakami's best work, but it was nice enough for what it is.
The narrator goes to the library to return a couple books and check something out. It's the afternoon, and he needs to go home soon, because it's almost dinner time and his mother worries. But just like anytime you have a goal in a dream, obstacle after obstacle appears in his path, to delay and sidetrack him, over and over.
He can't find the book himself, so he gets sent to the super creepy reference librarian, who finds 3 books, but they're for internal use only, so they can't be checked out. The narrator wants to go home, but the librarian guilt trips him about the effort it took to go find the books, so he agrees to stay a bit late and read for a little while.
So the librarian takes him through a vault door into an underground labyrinth that supposedly leads to the reading room. Instead it leads to a jail cell where the narrator will be imprisoned for a month while he reads and memorizes all three books. And yes, there'll be a test at the end where he has to recite them verbatim. Oh, and his jailer is a man wearing a sheep costume. The basement that's larger than the building it's beneath is a recurring feature of my dreams, and probably a lot of other people's too, and the impossible test that's coming too soon is a classic nightmare scenario.
From there, our narrator has to figure out how to get himself back out. There's no cop out 'and then he woke up' ending here - although the details are all dreamlike, Murakami treats them as obstacles that have to be overcome with a realistic escape plan.
At least a third of the pages had full-page images. To me, it mostly looked like designer Chip Kidd chose graphical elements from Japanese poster art, and then zoomed in and cropped the images to make them look stranger and more unsettling. Their relationship to the story is sometimes fairly direct, but often oblique, and in only a few cases, several images in a row appear to tell their own sequential narrative that complements the text.
The narrator goes to the library to return a couple books and check something out. It's the afternoon, and he needs to go home soon, because it's almost dinner time and his mother worries. But just like anytime you have a goal in a dream, obstacle after obstacle appears in his path, to delay and sidetrack him, over and over.
He can't find the book himself, so he gets sent to the super creepy reference librarian, who finds 3 books, but they're for internal use only, so they can't be checked out. The narrator wants to go home, but the librarian guilt trips him about the effort it took to go find the books, so he agrees to stay a bit late and read for a little while.
So the librarian takes him through a vault door into an underground labyrinth that supposedly leads to the reading room. Instead it leads to a jail cell where the narrator will be imprisoned for a month while he reads and memorizes all three books. And yes, there'll be a test at the end where he has to recite them verbatim. Oh, and his jailer is a man wearing a sheep costume. The basement that's larger than the building it's beneath is a recurring feature of my dreams, and probably a lot of other people's too, and the impossible test that's coming too soon is a classic nightmare scenario.
From there, our narrator has to figure out how to get himself back out. There's no cop out 'and then he woke up' ending here - although the details are all dreamlike, Murakami treats them as obstacles that have to be overcome with a realistic escape plan.
At least a third of the pages had full-page images. To me, it mostly looked like designer Chip Kidd chose graphical elements from Japanese poster art, and then zoomed in and cropped the images to make them look stranger and more unsettling. Their relationship to the story is sometimes fairly direct, but often oblique, and in only a few cases, several images in a row appear to tell their own sequential narrative that complements the text.
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