Birthday Stories

Despite the theme's happy connotations most of the short stories have a dark, melancholic atmosphere.

Murakami selected and translated the texts, adding an original short story of his own (later collected into his Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, 2006).

For the English edition at Harvill Press (using the original English-language versions of the stories), he added an introduction and selected one more story, Claire Keegan’s “Close to the Water’s Edge”.

The main editions are thus: The 2004 English edition of the anthology starts with an introduction by Haruki Murakami, where he speaks about his birthday and of birthdays in general (for example he mentions his visit to Jack London's farm, which he made because he liked London's writings and because they share the same birthday).

It compiles: This article about an anthology of written works is a stub.