Strange Library

 A tiny little surreal book with a lot of parallels in symbolism. In this volume everything seems to mean something, and we get the resurgence of the sheep man, plus a little girl who is mute and talks with her hands. So what is the meaning behind that? The font when she is speaking is blue rather than black, and nobody sees her other than the narrator. She mentions that each person is in their own world, and sometimes the worlds overlap and collide. Murakami is cross-referencing himself a little bit. The narrator gets locked up in a prison cell in the basement of the library with a ball chained to his foot, kind of an eerie image. He reads alone about taxes in the Ottoman Empire until the girl or the sheep man visits him. This is kind of a full circle moment for him, I guess. I think he was feeling deeply nostalgic when writing this as well, just read the very last passage. The narrator laments his mother, who dies of a mysterious illness, and with her his childhood and the woman who had always looked over his shoulder. The sterling, sheep man, girl, all gone. When he was in the cell he wasn't alone because the girl and the sheep man would come visit him, and I'm sure both of these people have their models from real life, and he was able to make it out of the library, while the girl turned into the sterling and the sheep man stayed behind and punished by the old man. There has to be some sort of survivor's guilt on Murakami's part that was explored at length in Norwegian Wood. This is all just such a strange dream and he keeps having the same dream over and over, in all shapes and sizes. We saw it in A Wild Sheep Chase, we saw it in Norwegian Wood, we saw it in The City and Its Uncertain Walls, and now we see it come full circle in this short story.

-Bruce