A small, beautifully designed and produced book, this is an illustrated novella which tells of a young man who drops in to his local library to look for a book on how taxes were collected in the Ottoman Empire. There he's led to a mysterious underground reading room by an old man and locked in. There he has a number of very strange meetings, in typical Murakami fashion, and the reader wonders whether he will ever escape, or if the experiences are truly happening. It's a delightful, if very dark story; one for the fans.