The youthful narrator calls into a neighbourhood library on an impulse to check facts about tax collecting in the Ottoman Empire.
He meets the Strange Librarian, and is then imprisoned for sinister ends, deep in the labyrinthine underworld of the Strange Library. He forms unlikely alliances with his jailer the Sheep Man (a character familiar to those who have read other Murakami novels) and a mystery girl who visits the cell where he has been ordered to memorise certain books on Ottoman tax collecting.
The impending fate awaiting the narrator upon the completion of this task is both hilariously unlikely and terrifyingly repulsive.
Despite the whimsical style and laughter in the dark of this fable for grown-ups, with its echoes of Kafka, Alice in Wonderland and Borges' Library of Babel, Murakami waits until the final sentences to steer the narrative into an unexpected, and emotionally powerful, conclusion. Unsettling, unclassifiable and memorable: all three traits of Murakami.
Possibly this short work is one for the already converted. A good place to start with this great Japanese novelist would be his most famous work Norwegian Wood, or the vast and intricate 1Q84.
- Victor Billot is editor of The Maritimes, the magazine of the Maritime Union.
