The New Weird: Haruki Murakami's "The Strange Library"

by Jon Petre

The self-dubbed "New Weird" movement has found quite substantial
favour in recent years, in authors such as China Mieville and Jeff VanderMeer. It combines literary experimentation with the old styles of H.P. Lovecraft and Mervyn Peake, with a modern genre twist that gives you something recognisable enough to understand but still strange enough to shock. Though I doubt Haruki Murakami would describe himself as a New Weird writer, his latest novellete "The Strange Library", I think, certainly belongs in that category.

A young boy, wandering home from school, wonders vaguely about how taxes were collected in the Ottoman Empire. He goes into the city library, because, as his mother's taught him, if you don't know something look it up in a library. But no sooner has he stepped over the threshold than he is spirited away to a hidden reading room below ground, where he's imprisoned with a mute girl and a man in a sheep skin by an elderly, imposing librarian.

This is just one example of the book.
It comes in a variety of colours.
I chose purple. 

I think you can see where the 'weird' comes into it.

This was a Christmas release, so if you're only just coming on to Murakami then hopefully you can probably get this cheaper than the reccomended £13.00 odd pounds, which I think for the content is pretty much extortionate. It's probably got something to do with the fact that it's only available in hardback, and the book itself...well, the book is beautiful.

This is a toe-dipped example of "Ergodic Literature"--books which play around with layout, fonts, formats and pictures to create something more interesting than words on a page. There are pages here designed like library cards, pictures and diagrams of things mentioned in text, and words organised in patterns and shapes that give the feeling of reading almost a children's book for adults. And this is definitely for adults; not because of sex, drugs, or anything like that, but I was surprised to get such a deep and dark plotline in such a conceivably short story. The boy himself is worryingly passive, and hopelessly attached to his mother--and for good reason, as we find out later. Weird fiction, generally, revolves around taking one key theme and changing it in one 'weird' way, and then accepting that as fact- so here we have submissive and benign characters, but in, say, Mieville's "Kraken" we have a giant squid accepted quite readily as a God. So although "The Strange Library" is lacking in realism that doesn't mean that Murakami's portrayal of his characters isn't realistic. In fact, it's impressive that he manages to make us care so much for the characters in such a short space.

This layout is great, but...there aren't many words, there. 

That said, I can't help but feel slightly cheated. I mean, come on. When I bought the book I hadn't realized how short it was; honestly, at times I felt that the pictures--many of which took up a whole page--were there to pad out the short length. Most short fiction is available at a fraction of the price with often more content in terms of word count. I think Murakami's relative celebrity is what allows him to get away with this--cough, cough, George RR Martin, cough, cough--because you can bet a publisher wouldn't waste their money printing a vignette like this for a new author. All the storytelling in the world doesn't make up for what smells not so faintly of profiteering.

It's a great book, don't get me wrong. It's just that it's not a novel, it's a novellete. As long as you know what you're getting that's fine. The Strange Library is beautifully written and beautifully designed, garunteed to give you something to think about on the train in and out of work in the morning. But. The fact that the price is (relatively) so high deters me from giving this what it, in itself, deserves. It's things like this that turn people to e-books, and you can't get something as unique as this on a kindle. If you can get this cheaper online, perhaps second-hand, I really urge you to go for it. It won't take long to finish.

3/5