He announces that his mother has died of a mysterious illness and he is alone. His grief wishes to make tragedy disappear. The boy’s voice is reduced to almost nothing. When he returns home, his mother is sweet to him and doesn’t berate him, for she is full of unspoken understanding.The last page of the book is written in tiny print. The little boy hides out in a library for three days. The yawning abyss of loneliness that awaits should his mother die suddenly becomes overwhelmingly real. The death of the bird makes grief and loss existentially real for him. At a subconscious level, he knows his mother is dying, but he doesn’t want to face it. A little boy, thoughtful and sensitive, is living with a sick mother and his pet bird. Death is victor in this fairly tale for adults.If one wants a rationalist version that could explain the plot. Thus, Murakami’s tale will be unsettling and disappointing, because it subverts hope. We like happy endings and we “believe” in them. The most fundamental reality is deeply comic, because life has the last word.So, even a secularist in the West will often bear a trace of religious belief. Why this excursus? Because Christianity tells a story of death’s defeat. And yet, we are also still the heirs of Western Christendom. Our consumerism is driven by the need for novel spectacle to keep darkness at bay. We distract ourselves from the ominous and ever present danger of death, which we nonetheless have hidden away as much as possible.

Don’t read further if you do not wish to discover the plot and denouement.The modern West is secular, superficially optimistic, and more deeply nihilistic. This may be true, but this work is more Heidegger and his notion that all being is “being towards death,” for mortality is the overt threat and deep context that suffuses the entire tale with ennui.For the rest of this, I am going to talk details, so this is a spoiler alert.

Critics sometimes note a connection to the French theorist, Lacan, and a theme of ever deferred desire in Murakami. So, you, the reader, are also inside the strange library.The voice of this work is vintage early Murakami: Whimsy, laconic humor, a mysterious beautiful girl, a sheepman, labyrinths, and worlds with permeable borders. There are all sorts of little things, like, for instance, a notation on the spine of the book that let’s one know that one cannot read the book outside the precincts of the library. It is a beautiful object and is meant to be handled and appreciated for the artistry of presentation.

⭐Strange Library is a dark work, powerful in its own terms, yet ultimately quite stark and grim.The first thing to note is the exquisite design of the book. Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

The strange library book