Birthday Girl

Haruki Murakami, "Birthday Girl" translated by Jay Rubin from Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2006).

This story is a different approach to typical grant-your-wish tales and raises questions about how one tries to decide what wish to make. What you wish for is certainly tied up with your identity—your hopes, desires, and fears. But, if you don’t know what you would wish for because you don’t know what kind of person you’ll be in the future, and you don’t know what you would’ve wished for 10 years ago because you were different then. What the hell are we?  We start to look rather ephemeral. 


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