Birthday Girl (narration)

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Birthday Girl ( Japanese バ ー ス デ イ ・ ガ ー ル Bāsudei gāru , "Birthday Girl") is a book with two stories by Haruki Murakami . These were published in German in 2004, 2006 and a new edition in 2017 by DuMont Buchverlag . They first appeared in the Japanese original in 2002.

Birthday girl

A waitress is on duty in Tokyo on November 17th for her twentieth birthday. She has to serve the food to the owner of an Italian restaurant. When he notices that it is the waitress's birthday that day, he congratulates her and says that he will grant her a wish. But you only have one wish and you cannot undo it. Contrary to what the owner suggests, she does not want intelligence, as this could change her being too much. Several years later, this woman is happily married, has two children, a dog and drives an Audi. She does not reveal her wish at the time either today.

My birthday, your birthday

Author Haruki Murakami is thinking about his own birthday. He knows that it is often overlooked, but still appears in many calendars. Since Murakami's birthday is on January 12th, he shares this date with Jack London, among others. In 1990 Murakami visited London's estate in the United States and drank a wine from their winery.

Illustrations

The illustrations are by Kat Menschik and refer to selected events in the story.

criticism

“After all, Murakami's story serves to formulate the question of whether and how much our wishes shape or change us. […] So there remains a stale aftertaste that the publisher is bringing another book by Murakami onto the market in order to earn money from his name. But he doesn't deserve the Nobel Prize for Literature. "

- Dennis Gerstenberger : Missed love effort

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dennis Gerstenberger: Missed love effort. In: literaturkritik.de, January 2018