The Strange Library

 The Strange Library

By Haruki Murakami

By now, I've exhausted all of the Murakami at the local libraries except this one. It's quite short, and took

only an evening to read, so it wasn't quite the immersive experience I was looking for. But it certainly lived up to its title!

The novella tells the story of a man -- a Murakami man! -- who wanders into a library looking to check out books. He is directed to a basement, where and old man leads him into a labyrinth and demands he check out a book. The narrator, who was more in the mood to browse than anything, is incredibly passive and gives into the old man's demands, even when he is taken deeper underground into a reading room that winds up being a jail cell. The assignment there: Read two books on tax collection in the Ottoman Empire and pass a test on it to be released. At first, he complies, but then the person who brings meals -- delicious meals, it turns out -- reveals that all of this reading and memorizing is just to make his brain more tasty and delicious and that, whether he passes the test or not, his gray matter will become a meal for the old man.

Then a young woman appears. There's always a young woman, isn't there? And she helps him escape the library to safety.

Very strange. But not long enough.