Birthday Girl (Book Review)

Title : Birthday Girl
Author : Haruki Murakami
Genre : Short story, Fiction
Published : Japanese (2002), English (2003)
Rating : 4/5

Synopsis :

She waited on tables as usual that day, her twentieth birthday. She always worked Fridays, but if things had gone according to plan on that particular Friday, she would have taken the night off.

One rainy Tokyo night, a waitress's uneventful twentieth birthday takes a strange and fateful turn when she’s asked to deliver dinner to the restaurant's reclusive owner.

Birthday Girl is a beguiling, exquisitely satisfying taste of master storytelling, published to celebrate Murakami's 70th birthday.

Review :

Haruki Murakami is a famous Japanese writer. I really wanted to know about his writing style for ages and it happened finally.

Murakami, after reading “Timothy’s birthday” by William Trevor and “The Moor” by Russell Banks, felt haunted and decided to collect more birthday-themed stories for an anthology. And he wrote this book especially for this collection.

This is the first time I read a short story in book form. And it took me exactly 20 minutes to finish this. This story is exceptionally nifty. It upholds enough suspense (for this book length) till the end.

“No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves. That’s all”.

And I’m warning all the readers that it has an “open-ended” climax. I interpreted its ending in so many ways. And it is totally up to readers' view. This book is a perfect delight for time savers.

“Time is going to play an important role”.

I highly recommend this book to all the readers who love short stories, to those who want to read good story in a brief time and of course to all the fans of Haruki Murakami.

Happy reading!!!

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