Opening the flaps on this unique little book, readers will find themselves immersed in the strange world of best-selling Haruki Murakami's wild imagination. The story of a lonely boy, a mysterious girl, and a tormented sheep man plotting their escape from a nightmarish library, the book is like nothing else Murakami has written. Designed by Chip Kidd and fully illustrated, in full color, throughout, this small format, 96 page volume is a treat for book lovers of all ages.
Opening the flaps on this unique little book, readers will find themselves immersed in the strange world of best-selling Haruki Murakami's wild imagination. The story of a lonely boy, a mysterious girl, and a tormented sheep man plotting their escape from a nightmarish library, the book is like nothing else Murakami has written. Designed by Chip Kidd and fully illustrated, in full color, throughout, this small format, 96 page volume is a treat for book lovers of all ages.
Reviews-
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September 22, 2014
A boy's routine day at the public library becomes a trip down the rabbit hole in Murakami's (Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage) short novel. The boy meets a demanding old man, who forces him to read the books he's requested in a hidden reading room in the basement. After following the labyrinthine corridors, the boy is led by the old man into a cell, where he must memorize the history of tax collection in the Ottoman Empire. In the bowels of the library, the boy meets a beautiful, mute girl who brings him meals, as well as a subservient sheepman (whom we also meet in Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase) who fixes the boy crispy doughnuts and clues him in to the old man's sadistic plans. Full-page designs from Chip Kidd divide the sections, bolstering the book's otherworldliness with images from the text alongside mazelike designs and dizzying close-ups of painted faces. This dryly funny, concise fable features all the hallmarks of Murakami's deadpan magic, along with splashes of Lewis Carroll and the brothers Grimm. 32 illus. First printing: 75,000 copies. -
October 15, 2014
"I'm going to slice you up nice and fine and feed you to the centipedes." Another off-kilter yarn from master storyteller Murakami: allegorical, shadowy and not at all nice.Murakami (Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, 2014, etc.) loves two things among many: Franz Kafka (think Kafka on the Shore) and secret places (think 1Q84). This latest, brief and terse, combines those two passions in the frightening vision of a hapless young man who, returning two books-How to Build a Submarine and Memoirs of a Shepherd-to the library, is sent to Room 107, deep in a basement he didn't know existed. Confronted by an apparently friendly but nevertheless no-nonsense old man, the youngster allows that he's interested in "how taxes were collected in the Ottoman Empire." And who wouldn't be? Well, that's enough to send our young fellow into a nightmare world featuring a blandly mysterious young woman, a sheep man, the ever present threat of danger and the nagging worry that his mom is going to be upset when he doesn't show up for supper. Even so, our young man has the presence of mind to ask the right questions: How, given strapped municipal budgets and library cuts, could "our city library have such an enormous labyrinth in its basement?" And why is he being imprisoned-for the answer comes back positive to his question of the Sheep Man, "Is this by any chance a jail cell?" It would take a Terry Gilliam, or perhaps a Kurosawa, to film Murakami's nightmare properly, and if the reader may well be puzzled over what the story, published in Japan in 2005, means at heart, then the prospect of the young man's being freed only if he passes rigorous questioning over, yes, taxation in the Ottoman Empire will ignite the fear-of-a-long-ago-final-exam syndrome in all of us. At once beguiling and disquieting-in short, trademark Murakami-a fast read that sticks in the mind.COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Starred review from December 1, 2014
Debuting mere months after his latest instant best seller, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, this fable is a surprise addition to Murakami's addictive oeuvre. After returning his library books, a boy is sent to Room 107 in search of other titles. There he's trapped by a bald old librarian, guarded by a Sheep Man, fed by a voiceless girl, and forced to memorize "three fat books" about the Ottoman tax system for insidious purposes. How will the boy get home to his mother (and pet starling) in time for dinner? VERDICT This novel is just 96 pages, with 32 of those illustrations curated and created by designer Chip Kidd. The artwork is intriguing, mysterious, and untranslated (hints: that's "Meiji Milk Chocolate" in Chapter 13 and an upside-down labeled planet zoom-out in Chapter 17). New audiences could read this as just another provocative, surreal tale, but Murakami fans will obsessively catalog the many multilayered references to previous titles, from the obvious Sheep Man (Trilogy of the Rat), labyrinthine other worlds (Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World), silently communicative women (After Dark) to, of course, librarians (Kafka on the Shore), plus much more. A mesmerizing Strange Library indeed. [See Prepub Alert, 9/8/14.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC
Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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November 1, 2014
Murakami's novels are odd, to be sure, but this short work, hot on the heels of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2014), compresses those oddities into one macabre fairy talelike story. A boy seeks out a book at the city library, only to be trapped there by a cruel old man and forced to read for days, stuffing knowledge into his brain, which the old man intends to slurp up. Whereas in longer Murakami novels, each strange scene is at least moored to some semblance of reality, this short work drifts apart, its eerie, dreamlike plot occurring completely within the walls of the labyrinthine prison beneath the library. Each object and character begins to take on a deeply symbolic quality, and, together with the intermittent full-page illustrations that merely suggest a connection to the story, the overall effect is unsettling yet captivating. This confounding work will probably not have as broad an appeal as his other novels, but fans of Murakami's weirdness, particularly his early books, will likely adore this distillation.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.) -
February 2, 2015
In this short, dreamy fable by Japanese fantasist Murakami, a young student describes his arrival at an odd Tokyo library. For no apparent reason, he is sent to the ancient, abrasive librarian, who leads him through an underground labyrinth of rooms and passages. On this curious journey the unnamed student is confronted by a man wearing a sheepskin, a large furious green-eyed dog, and a young woman who silently provides him with delicious, freshly baked doughnuts. Eventually he discovers the librarian’s sinister, seemingly inescapable plan. The novella has its share of whimsy, which reader Heybourne conveys along with the student’s youthful naïveté. Eventually this is replaced by a mood of confusion and anxiety, as the librarian croakily describes the protagonist’s fate. This audio presentation perfectly captures the perplexing, nightmarish, and beguiling atmosphere of Murakami’s fiction, but whether that is enough to compensate for the loss of the print edition’s brilliant full-page designs by Chip Kidd is a decision the buyer will have to make. A Knopf hardcover. - Alan Cheuse, NPR "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 story itself, full of characters and images both awfully weird and utterly down to earth, transforms as you read it, becoming a living, nearly talismanic exercise in how to lift yourself out of the realm of the ordinary and allow the sentences to carry you into an alternate universe. . . . 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 Washington Post "[A] charming, surreal story. . . . Cleverly designed and illustrated by Chip Kidd. . . . Whether he is writing for adults or children, [Murakami] remains a suspenseful and fantastical storyteller."
- Arifa Akbar, The Independent (London) "It had me enthralled . . . a story of childhood, death and reading, drawn in both words and pictures, like a fairytale, yet there was nothing childish about it. . . . Let the Murakami-mania begin (again)."
- The Boston Globe "Murakami's wry metaphysical play feels no less diffuse in this concentrated form. His usual fascinations--the instability of identity, the uses of knowledge, the oppression of memory--fade in with just enough time to fade out, offering just enough light to coax you forward, deeper into the dream."
- The Christian Science Monitor "Welcome . . . once again, to Murakamiland: sheep men, waifs, quests, attentiveness to little (odd) things, a labyrinth, a stairway down . . . absurdity and irrationality, the tension between the fantastical and the everyday, real and unreal, sadness and loss, then sudden shifts out of the blue, and plenty of the plain runic. . . . [The Strange Library] plumb[s] the kind of questions that leave us all wishing for more room to breathe: the singular and ever-solitary individual . . . the loss of identity (for better or worse), groping in the dark, self-understanding in an unknowable world, the dignity of idiosyncrasies. . . . The spirit and tone of the writing: As if Murakami is driving down a strange road, not know[ing] what's to come around the next curve: alert, aware, but as in the dark as the reader. He is, however, a really good driver."
- Washington Times "Those who come to Mr. Murakami's work for the first time will be elated by the clarity and wit of his style as translated by Ted Goossen, and intrigued by his characters and the situations they face. The Strange Library . . . stays in the mind because of its combination of brutality with flippancy, but mostly for its oddness. . . . In its own odd way it is a fun read."
- The Miami Herald "The Strange Library is a subteen's No Exit. . . . Beautifully designed. . . . Perfect for coffee tables in the gladsome season. . . . Readers looking for a light diversion in a heavily loaded holiday season should enjoy this existential vision."
- Elle "Japanese master Haruki Murakami's short fantasy tale The Strange Library, designed by Chip Kidd with sublime vintage Japanese graphics, takes readers on a wondrous journey to the mysterious underbelly of a Tokyo library."
- The Free Lance-Star (Fredericksburg) "Striking. . . . [This] dryly funny, concise fable has all the hallmarks of the author's deadpan magic, along with some Grimm and Lewis Carroll thrown in for good measure. . . . The perfect trip down the rabbit hole."
- The Japan Times "Murakami manages to endow [these] pages with all that we have come to expect from his more leviathan tomes. . . . [Chip Kidd's illustrations] seem so essential that, having experienced Murakami's story in this version, one can hardly imagine it in any other form."
- The Millions "Dreamlike. . . . What is immediately clear . . . is just how much thought went into the design and illustrated content.
