The Strange Library

by Haruki Murakami

And ever since I was little my mother had told me, if you don’t know something, go to the library and look it up.

“Okay, kid. Then I’ll give it to you straight. The top of your head’ll be sawed off and all your brains’ll get slurped right up.”

The food looked scrumptious. There was piping-hot sea urchin soup and grilled Spanish mackerel (with sour cream), white asparagus with sesame-seed dressing, a lettuce-and-cucumber salad, and a warm roll with a pat of butter.

“Our worlds are all jumbled together—your world, my world, the sheep man’s world. Sometimes they overlap and sometimes they don’t. That’s what you mean, right?”

The tricky thing about mazes is that you don’t know if you’ve chosen the right path until the very end. If it turns out you were wrong, it’s usually too late to go back and start again. That’s the problem with mazes.