Birthday Girl has a basic plot but it really lingers. Seems ordinary, but after an odd conversation the man offers to grant her a wish, any wish, as her birthday present. Murakami leaves us in the dark. I need to read another one of his novels soon. View all 11 comments. Apr 17, Annet rated it really liked it Shelves: asia , coming-of-age , weird , short , quirky.
Weird little story but strangely satisfying, although it is totally unclear what is going on exactly ;- A small start of the Murakami oeuvre for me, which I have planned to read. The rest is substantially more voluminous in pages. I liked this story! It's about a waitress in an Italian restaurant in Japan who turns 20 but has to work.
Unexpectedly the floor manager turns ill and she has to take over his job, bring up a tray of food to the owner of the restaurant, living in one of the upper floor Weird little story but strangely satisfying, although it is totally unclear what is going on exactly ;- A small start of the Murakami oeuvre for me, which I have planned to read.
Unexpectedly the floor manager turns ill and she has to take over his job, bring up a tray of food to the owner of the restaurant, living in one of the upper floors above the restaurant. And what happens then Strange atmosphere, absurd even.
Liked this story! View all 17 comments. Apr 28, Sandeep rated it really liked it Shelves: short-stories. That's all. She is asked to make a wish and it will come true. I always question ev "No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves.
The magical realism in his books hints towards the supernatural but it is rarely the case. Mostly they are used as metaphors to add depth to a very simple story. A common trait in all Murakami books is that you'll be left with more questions than answers. There is so much to be interpreted in the story. What was the girl's wish? Did it come true? Who is the narrator? Who was the owner of the hotel? Did he actually possess power to make a wish come true? This tiny story is open to so much interpretations that it blows my mind.
Overall a fascinating story, one that you'll read in a matter of minutes but will linger for a long time. View all 5 comments. Jan 26, Andrew Smith rated it really liked it. Instead, this tiny package was dropped through my letterbox containing a book no larger than the palm of my hand and featuring 40 pages of large print, each page containing no more than words — a single short story. But is it a good story? Very little really happens and I'm not giving much away — the beauty is in the flow of words put down by the writer — to say that it's about a young waitress who gets to make a single wish on her twentieth birthday.
So what wish would you make if you were told whatever you wished for would come true? We don't get to find out what the waitress asked for but we do get some clues towards the end as we meet up with her again some years later. What would most enrich your life: money, looks, brains? And would you think differently at twenty than you would at forty or at sixty?
Yes, an intriguing short read and one I'm so glad to have been prompted to re-read. View all 10 comments. I still don't know why this is published as a book. And it was like it wasn't written by Murakami. I know Murakami's books sometimes I mean all the time! It's like some book betrayal like the complete opposite of finding 3 books in 1 as in 1Q84! Even if his paged books talk about nothing much but with his genuine, amazing writi I still don't know why this is published as a book.
Even if his paged books talk about nothing much but with his genuine, amazing writing style I am all for it. But this one has completely topped the not-making-sense of not-at-all-making-sense. Bitter me. Be happy Murakami is still writing books.
Yes, let's rest the case here. Book betrayal. Murakami, undo this! If a 20 years old girl could have anything she wanted for her birthday -anything at all; what she would wish? I took some time to think, but I couldn't come up with a single wish.
That's because the author believes that: No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never been anything but themselves. Better take life as it comes Feb 11, Sam Quixote rated it liked it.
I wanted more from the story than I got and it seemed a bit of a cop-out to end it like that. Regular Murakami readers might be disappointed with Birthday Girl, but it is still a very good short story for someone who is looking to deep dive in the ocean that is Murakami. In his classic style, the author leaves the story open for individual interpretation so much that every time I think about it, I end up wandering in a different direction. There is so much that is left unsaid for the reader to explore and make sense of.
Murakami world is mysterious, and I love mysteries. You can already sense a story within a story, here. Having been read his previous works, I've come to this conclusion that Murakami's stories are serpentiform and unambiguous, you need to read it once, twice, t "Bumpers are for denting.
Having been read his previous works, I've come to this conclusion that Murakami's stories are serpentiform and unambiguous, you need to read it once, twice, thrice or more in order to dig in the hidden connotations. There was something cold and hard about her: if you set her afloat on the nighttime sea, she could probably sink any boat that happened to ram her.
Though, I really wished he'd have left some hints and I'd somehow come to know what the girl wished for that one time on her 20th birthday! Yet again, dear readers View 2 comments. Feb 11, Henk rated it liked it Shelves: japanese-literature. Typical Murakami weird, in a good way A very short Haruki Murakami but all the essentials, including an eerie feeling that reality is slightly off, are present. I must say that Birthday Girl is what I enjoyed most from reading 1Q84 , but then condensed from several hundred pages to only forty large print ones.
A waitress in Tokio, who works on her 20th birthday, is asked to bring dinner up to the reclusive owner of the restaurant she works in. He offers her a wish, a wish that we as readers are lef Typical Murakami weird, in a good way A very short Haruki Murakami but all the essentials, including an eerie feeling that reality is slightly off, are present.
He offers her a wish, a wish that we as readers are left to ponder as we don't get any clear answers. I loved the melancholic, lonely and rainy atmosphere sketched by Murakami and I finished in one breathless session. An excellent appetizer for the authors work.
Jan 20, Paul Fulcher rated it liked it Shelves: It was a beautifully shaped earlobe. The story though is an older one, from an anthology of birthday stories from famous authors David Foster-Wallace, William Trevor, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, Andrea Lee etc assembled by Murakami and then translated into English which for most stories involved un-translating them i. In the introduction to that book Murakami says that he felt inspired to add a story of his own and since none of the stories I had assembled focused on the birthday of a young girl, I chose my character more or less consciously to supply that missing element.
The result was this story. The original can be found in various magazines e. The set-up is a woman, now married, recounting to a friend the events of the night of her 20th birthday. She worked in a small upmarket Roppongi restaurant owned by a mysterious man who lives in an apartment in the same building. Each night the floor manager, and only he, takes the owner his meal - always chicken - and leaves it outside his room, returning an hour to pick it up.
The girl wasn't even meant to be working that night as it was her birthday, but two sudden illnesses mean that not only is she on duty, but she has to take up the meal. Anything at all that you wish for—assuming that you do have such a wish. What she wished for, and if it came true, are the obvious questions from her interlocutor, as is, more astutely, whether she regrets her choice, and these questions are at the heart of the story.
Or rather they aren't as she refuses to answer the first question, says it is too soon to say on the 2nd and turns the 3rd back on her friend. The story scores quite poorly on the Murakami bingo card but one can make a case for an unexpected phone call from her sick co-worker , supernatural powers at least the owner claims them , cooking although not the usual Murakami self-catering and Tokyo at night the Roppongi setting.
And there is a definite point for a gratuitous ear fetish on the 3rd person narrator's behalf - see the opening quote - perhaps the most signature Murakami element of all. Nicely done - 3 stars. Feb 13, Asha Seth rated it really liked it Shelves: , shortstories. The mystery, the goddamned mystery, is what kills the reader.
He describes reading these and feeling haunted. We go on to learn that she is serving tables because a coworker is sick. It is Friday, which is a typically busy night of the week for most restaurants. And at the end of the third paragraph, Murakami offers us the line:. Instead, Murakami pivots and continues describing the setting, and the reader gets to know the restaurant workers and the day-to-day happenings before the disruption of the equilibrium is introduced: the weather.
The weather heightens the intensity of the mood of the story. The incessant rain creates an atmosphere that disrupts the ordinary, mundane circumstances of this particular restaurant. When the birthday girl is asked to take the owner of the restaurant, an enigmatic figure no one but the manage has met, the reader is on the edge of his seat.
Like most Murakami tales, there is a story within a story, which always adds to the magic. DMCA and Copyright : The book is not hosted on our servers, to remove the file please contact the source url. If you see a Google Drive link instead of source url, means that the file witch you will get after approval is just a summary of original book or the file has been already removed. Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to short stories, fiction lovers.
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