Bros,
why does the girl always have to die? And why does she have to be a metaphor
for something? I just want the pretty girl to survive and be happy for once.
On
a serious note, the beginning of A Strange Library reminded me of the
Magnus Archives, a horror podcast I listened to during quarantine. They are
similar in the way that knowledge has a particular supernatural power in that
universe: the desire to learn something by reading a book or listening to an
audio tape can itself put a character at risk. Another similarity is the way
the narrator comes to embody the people he reads stories about, like how, in
the jail cell, the boy became the Ottoman tax collector from the book.
I also appreciate the uncanny
atmosphere in both stories. Normal seeming people turn out to be hiding
something sinister, and the main character is guided into a situation that
slowly strays further and further away from normalcy until it ends in something
outright scary. Murakami’s story begins in a library in daylight, and through
escalating capitulations to social pressure, ends in a dark jail cell.
One
question I have is about the food our narrator eats while imprisoned. It seems
to include cuisine from multiple different European countries. Why Spanish
mackerel and then Toulouse sausage? And why doughnuts and grape juice (both reoccurring Murakami foods) again?
Yelin Yao
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