Book Review: The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami

You know you're in for a strange turn in The Strange Library before you read a single word.  The "art direction and design" by Chip Kidd, for which he is credited on the back cover, would be better credited as a co-author.  The front cover bears cartoonish eyes above a distorted face where the nose (mouth?) is a circle labelled "107" and the title and author's name appear to be features of that face.  A strip along the left-hand side tells us the book is "FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY," a designation (along with the number 107) which figures prominently in the story.  Red dominates the front cover.  The bottom half of the cover folds up from the back cover, laying an attacking, fanged snout below the cartoonish eyes, a masterpiece of juxtaposition.  The reverse cover features an emblem that seems a cross between a mandala, a decoder ring, and an air force badge.

But each of these design elements gives way to the first page, the inside front cover (the story springs right upon you, with the copyright page tucked away at the back, though one senses that Chip Kidd would rather do away with copyright pages and bar codes entirely).  That first page is filled with a startlingly open eye, an animal eye with an oblong iris, surrounded by bristly fur.

The image itself has no direct bearing on the story (perhaps), but sets the tone - this tale will be something of a nightmare vision, a dream from which you struggle to awake, similar to Miyazaki's Spirited Away, where confusingly malignant forces imprison the naive.  This story will stare back at you as you stare at it.  That gaze will make you uncomfortable, and a little frightened.

Chip Kidd's design work has long enthralled me, and his book, Go: A Kidd's Guide to Graphic Design guides my teaching on design in my gifted classes, and as much as I was enthralled by Murakami's mysterious, disturbing story, Kidd's freewheeling, exuberant design drew me into the book - by which I mean the book itself, as an object, a thing you hold in your hand, whose pages you turn and whose words and pictures design and build a world much like our own yet entirely different.  You can feel the designer's joy as he searched old Japanese catalogs and children's books (and who knows what else) to crib and crop images that link to the story, that tell the story.  One of my favorites is, after a boy is led through a labyrinth to a reading room / prison cell below the public library (yes, the story is that strange; refer back to title) on the verso page, the recto (right-hand side) page shows an unsolvable maze pattern, red on sepia, with the image of an eye and eyebrow floating up on the edge.  Turn the page and the verso continues that design with the same maze and the other eye, with text reappearing on the recto.  The design imparts a sense of the character's feeling of entrapment, that cry of, Hey, get me out of here!

The book bears all the markings of a children's book - a young protagonist, the large print and short length - but it is more a moral fable, a troubling fairy tale for grown-ups.  What's the moral of the story?  Perhaps this: the world is a dangerous place, and the imagination much more so.