The Strange Library

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Well, I guess so. It was neat and wrapped up. It was still suitably ambigious enough for a Murakami story though. The whole thing was only a short story of his. It was padded out by the illustrations. And it was nothing new from Murakami. More of the same really. But I did love the library and the idea of it's hidden side." Little kids love being scared out of their pants, right? I remember I loved those un-Bowdlerized Grimm tales with wolves wolfing down your granny and little kids thrown into the oven for dinner. Our unnmaed narrator has his own share of terror in the maze-like corridors of the library: Unfortunately they do not speak English, so I will act as an interpreter through the procedure" said Moriko with a smile. "If you would follow me please."

His mother taught him that when he wants to know something, he should go to the library. Thus the library is part of his attempt to be self-sufficient. But it is also his escape from reality. The nightmare is a hideous parody of this desire to escape: the place that he escapes to has become the place he must escape from.

Dr Kato said that he was inspired to build the instrument during his time in an internment camp during World War II. Would you like to hear about it?" I still remember some dreams from my childhood and among those early dream memories are some nightmares. Nightmares can be so terrifying that they cause the dreamer to wake up, but there are also bad dreams where the anxiety never reaches a level that awakens the dreamer. These dreams run their course.

He gets to read the books, but hardly under conditions he could have anticipated; despite the circumstances (and some rather unpleasant pressure put on him to get the most out of the books) reading, too, becomes an entirely new experience:

Retailers:

The Strange Library, a novella by Haruki Murakami with illustrations by Chip Kidd, is an odd, beautiful little book. It tells the story of a lonely, unnamed boy who finds himself imprisoned in a labyrinth beneath a library. 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. 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. Originally published: November 1982. Short novel about a boy imprisoned in a nightmarish library. A lonely boy, a mysterious girl, and a tormented sheep man plot their escape from the nightmarish library of internationally acclaimed, bestselling Haruki Murakami's wild imagination. The illustrations differ in the various editions, as the US, UK, and German publishers all opted for their own versions rather than using the Sasaki Maki illustrations from the Japanese. If you are someone who has been waiting to start reading a book by Murakami but is perplexed by the sheer size of his works like 1Q84 and Killing Commendatore, this will be a good choice. Even though the writing and narration style is a little different compared to the usual style of Murakami, this will still be a good choice to start reading him if you don't like reading bigger books as it is comparatively smaller in size compared to his other works. Then, there is the leitmotif of stolen time. Speaking again of the girl, the narrator tells us that “she seemed exhausted. She had lost her color and had grown transparent, so that I could see the wall behind her.”

In the dream world, everything is slightly askew. The rules of reality don’t apply. Two people can be one and one can be two. A person can be both himself and someone else entirely. In the dream world, all the logic of Aristotle gives way to irrational leaps of the imagination. One thing leads to another, not by cause-and-effect, but by thought and association. Somehow I felt at home in this world. At least most of the time. The UK design also uses found pictures and imagery, but it is more varied and elaborate (see examples and some discussion here). It has elements of Kafka, Borges, Roald Dahl, Hillaire Belloc and Tim Burton, Neil Gaiman, with a dash of Orwell (but one digit out). It looks like a beautifully designed and illustrated children's book, though it's rather dark for small children, and YA feels wrong as well. Moriko's head popped into the small circle of white light. "Dr Sato tells me that there is a small book light beside the book".As I descended the ladder I noticed that the beige walls of the hole slowly resolved themselves into an array of some kind as the light level dwindled. I also noticed that the temperature of the air was dropping as well as that of the walls. In fact as I climbed further the walls appeared to be made of stone. When I reached the bottom I was in near darkness.

One of the exciting trips for all the bookworms will be their trips to the library. This trip will help you to discover new books that entertain you and sometimes even change your life in the best way possible. What if this journey turns into a nightmare? Murakami tells a similar story of a boy who gets trapped inside a library.

The book is at once fun and frustrating: the fold-over cover panels are peculiar, and the illustrations colorful, but the story itself is enigmatic almost to the point of being opaque. The overall effect leaves you scratching your head and wondering whether some publicity material might have been helpful, after all.