The Strange Library

by Haruki Murakami

I picked up The Diary of an Ottoman Tax Collector and began to read. The book was written in classical Turkish; yet, strangely, I found it easy to understand. Not only that, but each page stuck in my memory, word for word. For some reason or other, my brain was sop ping up everything that I read. As I flipped the pages, I became the Turkish tax collector Ibn Armut Hasir, who walked the streets of Istanbul with a scimitar at his waist, collecting taxes. The air was filled with the scent of fruit and chickens, tobacco and coffee; it hung heavily over the city, like a stagnant river. Hawkers squatted along the streets, shouting out their wares: dates, Turkish oranges, and the like. Hasir was a quiet, relaxed sort of fellow, with three wives and six children. He also had a pet parakeet every bit as cute as my starling.

“Please, tell me who you are,” I said. I am me, that’s all. “But the sheep man said you didn’t exist. And besides—” The girl raised a finger to her tiny lips. I held my tongue. The sheep man has his world. I have mine. And you have yours, too. Am I right? “That you are.” So just because I don’t exist in the sheep man’s world, it doesn’t mean that I don’t exist at all.

“The world follows its own course,” he said. “Each possesses his own thoughts, each treads his own path.

At the same time, my anxiety had turned into an anxiety quite lacking in anxiousness. And any anxiety that is not especially anxious is, in the end, an anxiety hardly worth mentioning.