Haruki Murakami: The Strange Library [Spotlight]
Author photo by Elena Seibert
A fantastical illustrated short novel about a boy imprisoned in a nightmarish library.
Opening the flaps on Haruki Murakami’s unique little book The Strange Library, readers will find themselves immersed in the strange world of the best-selling author’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.
“The mysterious pleasure of it all is the payoff when you read Murakami,” noted a review at NPR. “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 New Yorker talked to the book’s illustrator, Chip Kidd, who designs books by James Ellroy, Cormac McCarthy, Oliver Sacks, and many other top-tier contemporary authors. But his collaboration on the whimsical fairy tale The Strange Library marks the first time he’s illustrated an entire book front-to-back. “It was a book designer’s dream,” Kidd told The New Yorker. “I was given totally free rein.”
Buy The Strange Library from Amazon. (affiliate link)
HARUKI MURAKAMI was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages, and the most recent of his many international honors is the Jerusalem Prize, whose previous recipients include J. M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, and V. S. Naipaul. The Strange Library was translated by Ted Goossen.
Watch the video below for an analysis from Davood Gozli of Haruki Murakami’s The Strange Library…
