Birthday Girl: An Enigma

By Karen Zheng

If you’re looking for a quick read then Haruki Murakami’s “Birthday Girl” (2002) is for you. Consisting of around roughly 40 pages, this short story may be brief but it is bursting with ambiguity and charm.

The plot is simple. A married woman recounts the events that took place on the night of her twentieth birthday. Working as a waitress in Tokyo, she is asked to deliver dinner to the restaurant’s owner. What happens next takes a slightly strange and uncanny turn.

As with many of his other works of literature, Murakami weaves a dreamlike surrealism into otherwise quotidian moments. This is because “Birthday Girl” falls under the genre of magical realism.

The Journal Of Cultural Analytics refers to magical realism as literature “with magical or supernatural phenomena presented in an otherwise real-world or mundane setting.” I would describe “Birthday Girl” as being rooted mainly in reality with a bit of the surreal sprinkled in here and there. Like a light dusting of parmesan over a big bowl of spaghetti (the protagonist of the story works at an Italian restaurant, so this analogy works alright).

“Birthday Girl” is written in a way that can only be described as uniquely Murakami. The language is simple and yet it draws you in completely. You are left with more questions than answers by the end of the narrative but that is the beauty of it all.

By being so vague and cryptic, everyone gets something different out of it. It is strange in all the best ways.

Like the story itself, I’ll keep this short and sweet.

Go read it.