Story 3: Birthday Girl by Haruki Murakami

(This piece contains a description of the plot and there may or may not be spoilers. This is a work of Murakami so much is left to the imagination. There can't really be spoilers. But there will be my interpretations of the story. And that may spoil the experience of someone reading 'Birthday Girl' for the first time.)

Reading this book was a surreal experience. But considering who the author is, surrealism is not wholly unexpected. But halfway through the book, I realized that I had read it before. I vaguely remembered parts of the story but exactly?how I had felt the first time?I'd read it. (Generally adrift, yet happily afloat.)

The book begins with a young waitress who has to work on her 20th birthday. When she clocks into the restaurant, no one wishes her a happy birthday. But she has a special task to do that day - she has to take a chicken dinner to the restaurant owner whom no one has seen, except the manager. The girl does that. One thing leads to another. The owner asks her to make a wish. She makes a wish. Then we have this girl narrating this incident to someone a few years later.

Basically, as stories go, this is it - the whole journey from point A to point B. And it's not a spectacular story. It doesn't have the heartache of 'The Little Green Monster' or the throbbing despair of 'The Second Bakery Attack' (this one is one of my favourite Murakami stories.) But even though I didn't find 'The Birthday Girl' great, I was glad it was written. It's sweet, simple, complex, and sad.

There are parts of this short piece that are so incisive that you are flummoxed with how easily the author conveys such a deep understanding of human nature. (The description of the manager who can tie his bow tie manually and yet, has a "bachelor" smell comes to mind.) The details of a routine chicken dinner or a shimmering Tokyo skyline highlight the many ways lonely hearts conjugate themselves in a crowded world. There's another cheeky bit - when the old man snaps and grants a wish and how this symbolizes the blowing of a candle on a birthday cake.

But for me, the heft of narrative is in how this story ends - a simple, empty realization that life and time march on whether a wish comes true or not. And desires - whether met or unmet - still result in a zero-sum game.