Feast of words: Full brains are yummy

Need advice on how to deal with a cannibalistic librarian fattening up your brains with knowledge so he can feast on them?

Want to know how to communicate with a beautiful silent girl feeding you sea urchin soup and grilled Spanish mackerel? Long to learn how to remain surprisingly impassive while being thrust into a surreal reality? Although the protagonist of Haruki Murakami's recently released book, The Strange Library, might not have the answers, the author himself can help.

Last week he launched his own advice column, soliciting questions on his new website, "Mr. Murakami's Place" (Murakami-san no tokoro in Japanese). Murakami, according to his publisher Shinchosha, will "pen answers to queries on how to tackle all manner of difficulties".

Difficulties is what the unnamed protagonist of The Strange Library, published shortly after Murakami's latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, faces from the beginning of his journey into a threatening surreal world. The book, written a few years ago, has now been translated into English from the original Japanese by Ted Goossen.

The story of a hapless young reader's descent into the bowels of a public library, where he is kept hostage by a sheep man and his brains are fed on a diet of books about tax collection in the Ottoman Empire, is fully illustrated.

Rather than just propping up the book, the illustrations become integral to it, at times forming part of the text and responding to the words on the page. The designs work like symbols in a dream, lending the book a Jungian air. Menacing dog shadows and Escher-style stairways enhance the weirdness of the underworld in which the narrator is trapped. The tragedy of the story is that the boy allows himself to be trapped because he is too polite to resist. When the boy asks why he must memorise so many books, the sheep man explains: "Brains packed with knowledge are yummy, that's why. They're nice and creamy."

Reviewer Buzz Poole suggests the old librarian symbolises an estranged father figure and the repeated appearance of a green-eyed dog represents trauma.

Whichever way you read the book, as a psychological analysis, a cautionary tale on the dangers of unquestioning obedience or as an Absurdist text, Murakami has succeeded in creating the unsettling impression of a dream half remembered.