Can a Library Become a Literary Experience?

A visit to the Haruki Murakami Library at Waseda University became more than a literary stop - it was a reflection on memory, architecture, translation, and how cultural spaces can deepen our relationship with an author.

Kirill Oleshkevich

9/9/20268 min read

Inside the Haruki Murakami Library at Waseda University.

There are writers whose books we read. And some writers somehow become connected to particular periods of our lives. For me, Haruki Murakami belongs firmly to the second category. I started reading him while I was still in school. Since then, I have read all of his books - some more than once, and some in different languages.

So when I visited Tokyo this summer, the Waseda International House of Literature, better known as the Haruki Murakami Library, was not simply another museum or academic institution on my itinerary. It was personal. And perhaps that is why my strongest impression was not that I had entered "the world of Murakami's novels." It was something subtler. I felt that I had entered the world of Murakami himself - the writer, reader, translator, music lover, and person behind the books.

Before reaching the library, I spent some time simply walking around Waseda University. I immediately felt comfortable there. I have always loved academic environments: campuses, libraries, students moving between buildings, quiet courtyards, and the particular rhythm universities have when they function not only as places of work, but as small intellectual cities. Waseda felt modern, active, and surprisingly intimate at the same time. There were students everywhere, contemporary buildings alongside older architecture, trees, paths and small open spaces where university life seemed to continue naturally around you. For me, there was something almost familiar about it.

Then I reached Building No. 4, and suddenly the architecture changed the mood. The International House of Literature opened in 2021 after the existing university building was transformed by architect Kengo Kuma. Murakami, a Waseda alumnus, had donated a major collection of his books, manuscripts, reviews and records to the university; the project developed not merely as a memorial library, but as an international center for literature, translation and research.

The exterior immediately signals that this is not a conventional university library. A curved structure seems to emerge from the building and form something like a tunnel around the entrance. You have not opened a book yet. But the transition has already begun.

The most memorable element for me was the staircase. It connects the first floor with the level below, surrounded by bookshelves and a sequence of curved wooden ribs. Standing at the top and looking down, I immediately thought about Murakami's novels. His characters are constantly crossing boundaries. They climb down into wells. Descend underground. Enter strange hotels. Take elevators whose destinations are not quite what they seem. Walk through tunnels. Move from an ordinary urban environment into another layer of reality, sometimes without being entirely certain where the transition occurred. Anyone who has spent enough time with Murakami recognizes this mechanism. And here I was, physically descending into the lower level of a building dedicated to him. What fascinated me later was discovering that this association was not something I had invented.

The library itself describes the Staircase Bookshelf as a space suggesting that, through the smallest trigger, a visitor might suddenly be transported from everyday life into the "other world" familiar from Murakami's fiction. Kengo Kuma has likewise explained the architecture through the idea of a tunnel inspired by Murakami's stories. That is excellent cultural design. The building does not construct a fake set from Kafka on the Shore or 1Q84. It does not attempt to recreate a particular fictional location. Instead, it translates a literary mechanism into architecture. That distinction matters.

We often discuss adaptation in terms of medium: novel into film, manga into anime, film into theatre. But architecture can also function as a form of adaptation. The question becomes: How do you translate the feeling of reading into physical space? This is much more difficult than simply displaying manuscripts behind glass. Murakami's fiction is full of recurring sensations: passage, isolation, music, repetition, unexpected connections, spaces within spaces, ordinary objects that somehow acquire another dimension. The Waseda library does not literally illustrate those themes. It allows them to shape how the visitor moves. The tunnel at the entrance. The descent. The books surrounding the staircase. The quiet spaces below. The transition between exhibition, reading, music, and café. For me, that is the difference between theming and interpretation.

Theming says: "This looks like Murakami."
Interpretation asks: "How might a space behave like Murakami?"

One of the most impressive parts of the collection is surprisingly simple: books. A lot of books. But not simply Japanese editions lined up chronologically. The Gallery Lounge displays Murakami's works across languages and publication years. As of 2026, the collection includes roughly 2,200 editions arranged by year and language, while the institution also maintains manuscripts, writing materials, reviews, translated editions, and a major research collection. For someone interested in cultural circulation and localization, this is fascinating. Normally, when we say that an author is "international," the phrase remains abstract. We see sales numbers. A list of countries. Perhaps a map. Here, international circulation becomes physical. The same story sits on shelves in different alphabets. Different cover designs. Different publishing traditions. Different visual interpretations of the same author. A novel written in Japanese has travelled through translators, editors, publishers, designers and readers before returning to Waseda in dozens of material forms. You can literally see globalization on a bookshelf. And Murakami is an unusually appropriate author around whom to build such a collection. Waseda describes the institution's mission partly in terms of collecting and studying Murakami's works and translations, while connecting them with world literature more broadly.

The library is therefore not only asking: Who is Haruki Murakami?
It is also asking: What happens to literature when it crosses languages and cultures? That question interested me almost as much as the author himself.

This is why calling the place simply a "library" feels insufficient. There is an archive. There are exhibitions. There are first editions. There are photographs. There is a recreation of Murakami's study. There is an Audio Room containing equipment, furniture, and jazz records from his collection - particularly appropriate for an author whose relationship with music runs through both his biography and his fiction. And then there is the café. Orange Cat is located on the basement level and, interestingly, is independently operated by Waseda students.

I spent a couple of hours there. Coffee. Books. People coming and going. No rush to "complete the attraction." And I think that time was actually an important part of my visit. Because the strongest cultural spaces do not always need to constantly show us something. Sometimes they simply permit us to stay.

Museums often organize visitor behavior around movement: look - read - move - next object - next room - exit. A café attached to a cultural institution is often treated as an amenity. Here, sitting with a book and coffee felt completely consistent with the subject itself. Reading was not something represented in an exhibition. I was reading. The experience moved from observing a writer's cultural legacy to participating, very modestly, in the activity on which that legacy ultimately depends.

This distinction became important to me during the visit. I did not feel that I had somehow entered the worlds of Norwegian Wood, Kafka on the Shore or 1Q84. And I am glad the institution did not try too hard to create that illusion. There was no attempt to transform the building into a literary theme park. Instead, I felt closer to Murakami as a cultural figure. His books. His translations. His music. His records. His working environment. His relationship with world literature. The extraordinary international life his texts acquired after publication. This approach respects literature in a way I appreciate. A novel is not a movie set waiting to become physical. Much of its world exists precisely because the reader constructs it internally. Trying to make every fictional element tangible can actually reduce that imaginative space. The Waseda library largely avoids this. It materializes the context of the author, while leaving the novels themselves free to remain inside the reader.

Can we build experiences around literature? From a producer's perspective, this raised a larger question for me. We have become extremely sophisticated at building experiences around film, television, music and games. Theme parks reconstruct fictional worlds. Concerts extend music into visual spectacle. 2.5D theatre materializes manga and anime characters. Museums increasingly use immersive technology. But literature is harder. Reading is private. Slow. Internal. Often invisible.

How do you turn that into a cultural destination without trivializing it? There are many possible answers.
The Charles Dickens Museum in London preserves the actual home where Dickens lived and wrote, making biography and domestic space central to the encounter. The Franz Kafka Museum in Prague takes a much more interpretive approach, using documents, audiovisual material, music and scenography to connect Kafka's biography, Prague and the psychological atmosphere of his writing. The newer Hans Christian Andersen's House in Odense goes further toward experiential museum design, explicitly combining architecture, sound, light, scenography and storytelling to surround visitors with Andersen's imagination rather than simply present objects from his life.

These are very different models. Preserve the writer's real environment. Interpret the writer's psychological and cultural world. Create a new experiential environment inspired by the writer's imagination. Waseda offers another model: build an active intellectual space around the continuing life of the author's work. That may be the approach I find most interesting. Because Murakami is not being presented as a finished historical figure. He is still part of contemporary literature. His books continue to be translated. Read. Discussed. Studied. Reinterpreted. The building therefore functions not only as a place of preservation but as a place of continued circulation.

A museum can preserve objects. A cultural space can preserve relationships. This may be the main producer's lesson I took from Waseda. When cultural institutions think about legacy, they often begin with objects. What do we own? What can we display? What can we archive? All of that is necessary. But audiences do not build emotional relationships with archives simply because the archives exist. They build relationships through encounters. A staircase can become one. A book in an unexpected language can become one. A record can become one. A photograph can become one. A chair and a cup of coffee can become one. The value of experience design is not that it makes culture more entertaining. Its best function is to create circumstances in which the visitor can establish a more personal relationship with cultural material. That is what happened to me at Waseda.

At some point, sitting downstairs with coffee and a book, I experienced something I had not expected. For a moment, I remembered what it felt like when I first started reading Murakami in high school. Particularly The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Not the plot. The feeling. That peculiar sensation of discovering an author whose logic you do not yet completely understand, but whose world somehow makes immediate emotional sense. When we return to books decades later, we are not really returning to the same books. We have changed. The text has not. And somewhere between those two facts lies one of the strange powers of literature. It stores earlier versions of us. A song can do this. A smell can do this. A place can do this. And sometimes a library can do it too.

I arrived at the Haruki Murakami Library expecting to see an interesting collection devoted to a writer whose work I have read for most of my life. I left thinking about something broader. What should a literary institution actually preserve? Books? Certainly. Manuscripts? Of course. Biographical information? Absolutely. But perhaps it can preserve something else as well: the relationship between a reader and a writer. Architecture cannot reproduce the experience of reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle for the first time. Nor should it try. But it can create a space in which that memory becomes available again.

For me, the most powerful moment was therefore not looking at a rare edition behind glass. It was descending that staircase. A perfectly ordinary physical action. And yet anyone who has lived long enough inside Murakami's fiction knows that going downstairs is not always just going downstairs. Sometimes it is the beginning of a passage. I first made that passage through Murakami's books while I was still in school. Decades later, in Tokyo, I found myself making it again - this time physically, inside the university where his own story had once begun. And at the bottom of the stairs there were books, coffee, memories, and several quiet hours in which the distance between those two moments became unexpectedly small. Perhaps that is what a successful literary space can do. It does not replace imagination with architecture. It uses architecture to return us to imagination.