Story as Art Object 
 Equal credit for this small book should be given to designer Chip Kidd as to author Haruki Murakami (and his translator Ted Goosen). The actual story (a mere 7,500 words or so) is charming but slight, a nightmare fantasy about a boy who gets imprisoned in a cell deep in the basement of a public library by an old man with Hannibal Lechter appetites. What makes it special is the physical design of the book itself, Kidd's work, rather than Murakami's. Opening in an unusual way, like a Japanese notebook, with cover flaps that fold up and down, it presents itself as a block of color prints, almost as many pages as the story itself, which is printed in large typewriter font interleaving the illustrations. These are in full color, modern yet with an old-fashioned air at the same time, in a similar style to the covers of many of Murakami's books. At any rate, the combination of text and illustration kept me happily engaged for the half-hour it took to read this, and I could imagine keeping it on my coffee table for a month or two to show my friends. But it is a work of negligible substance, that will offer little to serious followers of Murakami's novels.