The Strange Library

 Hello Class, 

After Wednesday's class, I was thinking about The Strange Library and its interpretations. When I read the first page I had immediately thought that our protagonist was entering the "Otherworld" as he said the sound of his footsteps didn't sound right. This made me think that he was at some sort of midway point between life and death. This seemed almost right. However, during class it was brought up that the library's labyrinth was actually him entering his own mind, or his subconscious. When I thought about this, it seemed to put all the previous puzzle pieces together. 

This made me think of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. The Library where our protagonist confronts his fears/grief about his mother reminded me of the part where Toru enters a deep well to get over his fears and find his wife. In that scene, the stillness and darkness of the well kind of forces Toru to just sit with his thoughts, which feels both uncomfortable and necessary. It’s almost like he has no choice but to confront what he’s been avoiding. These two examples appear to be almost opposite, Toru enters the well to find someone, whereas Boku gets lost in his mind and is rescued by aspects of his own subconscious (the sheepman and starling/girl). 

It also seems like Murakami uses these strange spaces as a way to show how isolating these experiences can be. The characters are physically alone, but they’re often confronting many things/people in their own mind.

Raul Valles

Prison of the Mind - Alexia

Murakami often creates surreal, enclosed spaces that feel separate from reality, but these spaces are rarely just physical settings as they reflect the inner workings of his characters’ minds. In both The Strange Library and The City and Its Uncertain Walls, the environments are shaped less by logic and more by emotion, memory, and psychological tension. As a result, the characters move through these worlds in ways that feel disoriented or detached, almost as if they are navigating their own consciousness rather than an external place. This makes it possible to read both texts as portraying characters who are, in a sense, prisoners of the mind, where the boundaries between physical confinement and internal struggle begin to blur.

In The Strange Library, the underground maze isn’t just a place where the boy is physically trapped. It mirrors the feeling of being stuck inside a confused, overwhelmed state of consciousness. The maze is disorienting, illogical, and difficult to navigate, much like intrusive thoughts or anxiety. The fact that he is forced to read and absorb knowledge, only to have his brain threatened. This suggests that his own mind is being turned against him. The imprisonment feels psychological because there’s no clear logic, no reliable sense of time, and no control.

In The City and Its Uncertain Walls, the city functions in a quieter but equally unsettling way. Instead of chaos, it is structured and calm, but that structure comes at the cost of emotional depth and individuality. The separation of shadows represents a splitting of the self, where essential parts of identity, such as memory, desire, emotional intensity, are suppressed. The city feels like a controlled inner world, almost like a version of the mind that has shut down parts of itself to avoid pain.

What makes these spaces feel like internal landscapes is that they operate according to psychological rules rather than physical ones. The maze reflects a mind in distress,as it is fragmented, confusing, and oppressive; while the city reflects a mind that has become too controlled, detached, and lacking emotional depth. Together, they show two extremes of the same idea: being trapped within yourself, either through overwhelming chaos or through enforced emotional emptiness.

Libraries in Murakami Stories- Carly

I think most people associate the library with being a safe, quiet place to learn or just to be. However, in Murakami's stories, libraries are often strange or even dangerous. In The Strange Library, Boku is trapped in a jail-like cell and is forced to memorize books until he finally escapes through an underground maze. In this story, the library became a place of control over Boku, a reversal of the common belief that knowledge gives you freedom. 

It also made me think of Fahrenheit 451. In Ray Bradbury's novel, books are forbidden due to the government's fear that people will start to critically think about the world around them. The government fears that people won't be able to handle the negative emotions that come from the freedom of thought.  In The Strange Library, books are not burned, but similarly to the government in Fahrenheit 451's ideology, the content of those books poses some sort of threat to your life. Books can take you away from your family, consume you, and hold you hostage. 

In Murakami's stories, I think libraries and books show how looking deeper into yourself can be uncomfortable. Boku going deeper into the library and having to question his reality is similar to the process of entering the hidden parts of the mind. Like bookshelves in libraries, we also store memories, fears, and desires. In Murakami's stories, libraries are used as a pathway to question your unconscious mind, which at times can feel difficult to escape. 

Libarary, memory, and a possible intersect between Strange Libraries and Uncertain Walls

 Uncertain walls by Murakami is probably my favourite novel of his so far. It feels like a return to Norwegian Wood with a maturity to explore the concept of his grief through a world rather than a character. Most interesting to me, is the conception of the inner consciousness/mind being both a neutralizing/safeguarding and decaying system. This reminds me strongly of many of the techniques used in therapy for anxiety and depression, in the sense that we so often percieve our anxious emotions as coming from the heart anf requiring a "rationalization" and or "temperance" from the mind. I feel like Murakami is somewhat challenging this idea by bringing in how the constant challenging, rationalization, and depression of emotions and memories doesnt invariably leads to a loss of humanity, otherwise known as the death of your shadow. This is invariably a story of seclusion, emotional instability, and human emotion.

The strange connection I wanted to make between A Strange Library and Uncertain Walls is in how they can somewhat be put together. We could think of Boku's job as a dreamreader similarly to the bookkeeper in strange library. What I mean by this is, both boku and the bookkeeper use an external form of information holding (egg, and person) and force them to mold the knowledge within them so that they can suppress/experience that knowledge and codify it as useful/tasty. It is this same give and take relationship with knowledge and could be helpful to us in understanding Murakami's conception of knowledge/memories.

Thomas 

Reflection on A City and its Uncertain Walls

I just finished the entirety of A City and its Uncertain Walls and out of all the Murakami books I have read, this one is my favorite. At first glance, it feels very similar Hard Boiled Wonderland and has many elements from Kafka on the Shore. However, this all changes when you find out that Mr. Koyasu is in fact a ghost. From that point on, I couldn't put the book down. At first, my initial interpretation was that in Part 2, the MC wakes up as his full self, even though it was his shadow that left and not his real self. Throughout this part, there are many references to this fact that despite his original wishes, whether it be him saying that he just woke up in this body despite this decision, or him actually having his shadow in the real world, compared to Mr. Koyasu who doesn't have one. This was the line of thinking that I held up until the last line of Chapter 62:

"Did you know that? The two of us are nothing more than someone else's shadows." (Murakami 406).

With this line, it came to me that A City and its Uncertain Walls told the story of someone within a constant state of dissociation. While experiencing dissociative episodes, you feel like you are in the backseat and not in control of your life. However, I have never considered the point of view of who was in the drivers seat, which in this case would be the shadow. In this book, the shadows represent the true selves of the characters while the inhabitants in the walls are only a husk of their past selves. There is no happiness, no sadness, just numbness as you carry out the repetitive tasks of a mundane life. This is where the real you is buried, under layers of depression and isolation, surrounded by an imaginary, high wall in your consciousness that changes shape depending on your internal state. When the MC and his shadow attempt to break out and are stopped by the wall, this is your own mind attempting to keep you from getting better. The world outside, is a scary, fucked up place that you aren't in control of, whereas the depths of your mind feel safe to you, being something that you have control over. Whether it be analyzing old dreams, which could possibly be old hopes and aspirations / old memories of yourself, or guarding the most inner layer of your consciousness and never allowing anything in or out, these seem much easier than presenting yourself to the real world. Similarly, with dissociation, you don't realize you are dissociating until you suddenly snap out of it, just like the shadow did at the end of part 2. So it makes sense why the shadow and the reader would think that the entirely of part 2 is told in the perspective of the real MC. 

One can also take into account that Murakami picked up writing this novel in March of 2020 when the Covid-19 Pandemic hit Japan. In more ways than one, this can be seen as another source of isolation and depression seen throughout this novel and why it may sound so different than his other works. He writes in a bit more detail about this fact in the afterword of this book, where he believes this fact to be significant in its production and that he "...feel[s] it in [his] bones." For anyone who was really intrigued by part 1, I highly recommend finishing the rest of the book and or at least reading up to page 200 before deciding to quit or not!

- Angus

If I Could Float Forever In Space and Breathe A Clump of Hydrogen

Separation.

Boku in A Wild Sheep Chase is separated from the sheep man. Toru in Norwegian Wood is separated from Midori and Naoko. Boku in The City and Its Uncertain Walls is separated from his shadow.  Every Murakami protagonist finds themselves drowning from their own, personal separation.

What is separation to Murakami? Is it a form of alienation? Yes, but that would be oversimplifying things to the extreme.

Separation is the causality of what once was, meaning, the thing existed at one point in one state before being split or broken apart into another. Toru was permanently separated from Kizuki, which then transforms into genuine feelings for Naoko. When Toru's feelings aren't reciprocated by a detached Naoko, his feelings transform into affection for Midori. A dialectical chain of movement; Toru's feelings are repeatedly torn and put back together in an attempt to rekindle his separated feelings.

Boku in A Wild Sheep Chase goes through an opposite development. Instead of embarrassing the chain of causality in his life, he attempts to reclaim his separation through the chase of the black-star sheep and the Rat. He chases after these beings in hopes of reclaiming what never existed, a false-reality in which he was once whole. The sheep promises to make him whole, bringing him into dasein, the being of "there". But alas, Boku never ends up becoming Boku, the complete, but continues to just be "Boku".

The Boku of The City and Its Uncertain Walls faces separation from his shadow. He allows his shadow to live and rot within the surreal, impossible city. As he let's go of it, time passes as Boku forgets feeling and memory. Time moves on without him. In doing so, Boku simply becomes a person with only a capacity for thought. He thinks, thinks, and thinks yet never lives, the primary job of his shadow. 

Like life itself, separation is diverse. Murakami's characters often deal with the consequences of striving for or against it, but it an inevitability. A flower can never bloom into reality if the pollen if it doesn't trust the wind. The same applies to humanity. One can never grow if they choose to break apart. Through the loss of sight does one truly learn to feel.

-DK 

Abandoning the Library: Murakami's Parental Figures & Grief

I quite loved The Strange Library—it might even be my favorite thing we've read so far in class—and from the first mention of her, I found myself very intrigued by the main character's mother as a source of wisdom and of stability. I've been thinking a lot about manifestations of grief and loss in Murakami—the wife's slip (or lack thereof) in A Wild Sheep Chase, the clothes and records in "Tony Takitani," and now the leather shoes in The Strange Library—and most of all, what kept coming back to me was "Abandoning a Cat." (I don't want to speculate extensively about his grief over his actual father or about his experience, so I'll use "Abandoning a Cat" as evidence but avoid making any broader assumptions than what is provided in the nonfiction piece.)

Murakami's relationship with his father is something I thought about a lot after because the image of the two of them as mirror images that could never quite fully reconcile ("We were two of a kind. For better or for worse.") was present in "Tony Takitani" as well. In this novella, however, I was struck by this line in particular that the old man says to the boy after he says he can't stay to read because he has to make it home for dinner: "'When I was your age I felt fortunate just to have the chance to read. And here you are whining about the time and being late for dinner. What nerve!'" This immediately brought to mind the rift between Murakami and his own father, "I’m the type who eagerly pursues things I’m interested in but can’t be bothered with anything else...This disappointed my father, who I’m sure compared me to himself at the same age. You were born in this peaceful time, he must have thought. You can study as much as you like, with nothing to get in the way. So why can’t you make more of an effort? I think he wanted me to follow the path he hadn’t been able to take because of the war."

I found this similarity interesting, paired with the mother's death in The Strange Library and the description in "Abandoning a Cat" of their constantly strained relationship about which he says that, "If at a certain point I’d attempted to rebuild our relationship, things might have gone in another direction, but I was too focussed on what I wanted to do to make the effort." I believe that the experience of the young boy in The Strange Library might be 1) a nightmare (similar to the dreams he has in "Abandoning a Cat,"I still have nightmares in which I have to take a test at school and can’t answer a single question. Time ticks away as I do nothing, though I’m well aware that failing the test will have major consequences—that sort of dream. I usually wake up in a cold sweat.") and 1) a manifestation of his (possible) regret over not having mended the relationship sooner. 

I think the library works very well as a sort of obscured, liminal place (especially in relation to dreams after reading The City and Its Uncertain Walls) as well as a metaphorical space. My theory here is that this represents a world in which he does try to mend the relationship by following orders (since the boy's nature is inherently submissive and Murakami makes it clear that in real life he was "too focused" doing what he wanted to obey his father's wishes). The old man is an augmented manifestation of the expectations his father has for him (NOT the father himself, since I don't think Murakami thinks his father will eat his brain, but rather that his guilt over the expectation might swallow him whole), and the labyrinth of the library could be . I find the constant presence of the mother's worry and the lessons she has passed down very similar to Murakami's father, though the former is taken seriously and the latter was discarded. The mother figure would then represent the truth of what occurred (the state of consciousness after the dream): he, only briefly, was able to achieve reconciliation with his father before he passes when he "barely recognizes him," just like the boy in the novella when his mother seems to be shrouded in shadows. 

This novella still ends vaguely the way "Abandoning a Cat" does and outlines to me the crushing inevitability of grief and guilt even as the feelings are deferred and postponed: "My carelessness had ruined everything—even my pet starling had been sacrificed. I had lost my good shoes, and I would never see my mother again." Overall, I think this is a wonderful rich story and there's much more to say about it such as with the sheep man and what the "girl-who-was-a-starling" represents, and I'm very excited to talk about it in class!

—Alana