Hardship is an ancient topic. It is difficult to believe there is much new to say about it. Sure, insights can be drawn, good stories told. But can tales of hardship feel surprising? Apparently yes. The celebrated Japanese author Haruki Murakami’s tales of woe feel as if he invented the topic — and his new novelette, “The Strange Library,” feels as if he has distilled his tales of hardship to their essence.
Barely 100 pages, this gorgeous little book is a Grimm’s fairy tale bound with bold illustrations and designed by Chip Kidd. Like all of Murakami’s books, “The Strange Library” is bizarre and moving and, yes, surprising.
The fairy tale revolves around a young boy who visits a library, only to be imprisoned there by a mysterious man who aims to eat the boy’s brains. The writing is playful and dreamlike, as evidenced by this exchange between the boy and the jailer’s assistant:
“Don’t you think that’s awfully cruel?” I asked. “Speaking from the suckee’s point of view, of course.”
“But, hey, this kind of thing’s going on in libraries everywhere, you know. More or less, that is. … If all they did was lend out knowledge for free, what would the payoff be for them?”
Like other Murakami heroes, the boy is a passive person. He winds up jailed in the bowels of the library mostly because he is too polite to say no. “Why do I act like this,” he asks himself at one point, “agreeing when I really disagree, letting people force me to do things I don’t want to do?”
His passivity echoes Tsukuru Tazaki of Murakami’s most recent novel “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage” and Toru Okada of Murakami’s “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.” And here is where Murakami brings something new to tales of woe.
The boy of “The Strange Library,” Tazaki, Okada and other characters of “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” experience hardships. Some are fantastical — like being jailed in a library by a brain-slurping librarian. Some are mundane — like having best friends or a wife abandon you suddenly and without explanation. Some are simply nightmarish — such as watching a fellow soldier be skinned alive.
What comes next is Murakami’s bequest to thousands of years of writing about this topic. In reaction to hardship, Murakami’s characters become empty shells of themselves, descending into profound darkness for years, even decades. Eventually, many emerge, often as entirely new people. Some even take new names. This is not depression he is describing. It is not a biological thing; it’s spiritual. These difficult events, he is saying, can rip us in two. Literally.
Here is Murakami describing Tsukuru in “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage,” after his four best friends have abandoned him without explanation: “It was as if he were sleepwalking through life, as if he had already died but not yet noticed it.”
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After one character in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle witnesses the flaying of a fellow soldier, and then is thrown down a well to die, he emerges deeply scarred. “After returning to Japan, I lived like an empty shell,” the character says. “The heart and flesh of an empty shell give birth to nothing more than the life of an empty shell.”
These stories feel different and new. They do not follow the formula of the Laura Hillenbrand’s best-selling “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption,” with its story of an extraordinary person’s triumph over adversity. They are stories of regular people struggling with tragedies in their lives, and their inability, for years, to overcome them in any way.
Eventually, many of them do, although they do not emerge triumphant and defiant. They surface, often, as new people. Not stronger, necessarily, but simply new. The boy of “The Strange Library” musters up the courage to attempt an escape. Tsukuru’s pilgrimage of the title is his quest to find out why his friends left him. The main character in “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” attempts to find out why his wife left him.
All of them, however, are left with memories of their dark periods. It is a profound darkness they cannot fully shake. Here is the boy of “The Strange Library,” at the end of the book:
I lie here by myself in the dark at two o’clock in the morning and think about that cell in the library basement. About how it feels to be alone, and the depth of the darkness surrounding me. Darkness as pitch black as the night of the new moon.
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Trine Tsouderos is a frequent Printers Row Journal contributor.
“The Strange Library”
By Haruki Murakami, translated by Ted Goossen, Knopf, 96 pages, $18