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At the turn of the '90s, a distinguished science fiction scholar and longtime editor of SF notables sat down with literary superstar Haruki Murakami. The Japanese writer was keen to talk about one of his literary passions: science fiction. Murakami is, as it turns out, a lifelong SF fanboy who started reading the genre as a kid, and he hasn't stopped. He said he'd read "all of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard." In his 20s, he added, Robert Silverberg's Nightwing was his favorite novel in any literary category. This was long before imaginative fiction became the new chic. Murakami's conversation with the genre continues in everything he writes, including his latest work of fiction, a slim venture into fantasy that contains elements familiar to his fans. From The Wind-up Bird Chronicle through Kafka on the Shore and IQ84 on to Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage , the novelist explores the land of the pla

As if the work of Japanese fiction master Haruki Murakami weren't strangely beautiful by itself, his American publisher has just put out a stand-alone edition of his 2008 novella The Strange Library, in a new trade paperback designed by the legendary Chip Kidd. "The library was even more hushed than usual," we read in the opening sentence (the entire book is set in a typeface called, appropriately, Typewriter), calling attention to the fact that we're in for a special event. Murakami sets his story — newly translated from Japanese by Ted Goossen — in a realm of words, an unnamed city library. An inquiring schoolboy stops by on the way home from class, returns some library books ( How to Build a Submarine and Memoirs of a Shepherd) and asks for reading on a subject he says has just popped into his head: tax collection in the Ottoman Empire. An unfamiliar female librarian sends him down to room 107, "a creepy room" where yet an