A boy goes to the library to find out how taxes were collected in the Ottoman Empire, which is already a very Murakami sort of mistake. 

This is Murakami in miniature: dream logic, menace, melancholy, deadpan absurdity, and loneliness dressed up as a fable. It has the mood of a children’s book found in a drawer it absolutely should not have been in. The story is brief, but the design does a lot of the haunting — full-colour illustrations, collage-like pages, strange image-text rhythms, and that lovely object-quality where the book feels less “read” than handled like evidence.

A good Murakami entry point for someone who wants the weird without signing a lease inside Kafka on the Shore, and a neat little artefact for collectors of illustrated fiction, strange libraries, literary oddities, and books that look innocent while quietly installing a trapdoor under the floor.

Hardback illustrated edition, published by Harvill Secker/Vintage in 2014, translated by Ted Goossen. ISBN 9781846559211. As new.