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Birthday Girl

Birthday Girl

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

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 had 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.

Birthday Girl is also available in Birthday Stories and Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.

Reviews

  • A subtle story that leaves readers analysing every moment… It's undoubtedly a story you can read again and again and derive a different interpretation with each new reading, which just goes to show why it's still being published and talked about nearly 20 years after it was first published

    Culturefly

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About the Author

Haruki Murakami

In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers' award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, that turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and Men Without Women, Murakami's distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring his place as one of the world's most acclaimed and well-loved writers.

Haruki Murakami

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Recommendations

Book your holiday: Tokyo

Tokyo has inspired all manner of writers, from home and abroad, seeking to evoke its unique atmosphere over the years.
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Competitions

Win a VINTAGE Japanese book bundle
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Extracts

Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami

Read an extract from the epic new novel by the internationally acclaimed and bestselling author of 1Q84, Norwegian Wood and Kafka on the Shore.

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