Book Review: Birthday Stories by Haruki Murakami

Rating: ★★★★☆

I first read Birthday Stories on 1 April 2013.

At the time, Murakami and I were still at war.

Every book felt like a battle of wills between author and reader. I wanted explanations; he offered ambiguity. I wanted conclusions; he left doors half-open. I wanted reality to behave itself; he seemed determined to fill it with absences, coincidences, and unanswered questions.

Needless to say, neither of us was willing to compromise.

So when I picked up Birthday Stories, I approached it with all the optimism of a reader who still believed birthdays should be celebratory and short stories should arrive neatly at their destination. What I received instead was a collection steeped in loneliness, regret, missed connections, and the peculiar melancholy that accompanies the passing of time.

I was unimpressed.

In fact, after finishing the collection, I took a lengthy hiatus from Murakami altogether. My days seemed noticeably brighter without him lurking on my bookshelves, gently reminding me that existence is strange and nobody really knows what they're doing.

Fast forward to 2026, and Murakami has somehow become my literary toxic guilty pleasure.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped trying to wrestle answers from his stories. I learned to appreciate atmosphere over explanation, questions over answers, and the strange comfort that exists within uncertainty. What once felt frustrating now feels intentional. What once felt unfinished now feels alive.

Returning to Birthday Stories after all these years, I realise that the collection itself was never really the problem.

A short story is perhaps one of the most demanding forms of writing. A novelist can spend hundreds of pages building a world, but a short story must establish atmosphere, character, conflict, and meaning within a fraction of that space. Every sentence must earn its place.

The stories gathered here showcase many of the qualities that have come to define Murakami's work. There is ambiguity. There is quiet unease. There are moments where ordinary life suddenly slips sideways, revealing something stranger beneath the surface. The narratives rarely provide easy answers, and the emotional impact often lingers long after the story itself has ended.

Yet what struck me most on rereading is how little these stories are actually concerned with birthdays.

Birthdays serve merely as a doorway into larger questions: the passage of time, the distance between who we were and who we hoped to become, the regrets we carry, the people we lose, and the uncomfortable awareness that life keeps moving regardless of whether we are ready for it.

It is not an uplifting collection. If anything, it confirms Murakami's almost pathological attraction to the darker corners of human experience. Even moments traditionally associated with celebration become opportunities to examine loneliness, longing, memory, and mortality.

And yet, there is curiosity here too.

What I appreciate now is that the collection never treats these questions with cynicism. The stories may be melancholy, but they are never cruel. They approach life's mysteries with a kind of quiet wonder, as though asking questions is more important than finding answers.

Not every story worked for me, and some remain stronger than others. That is perhaps inevitable in any collection. But viewed as a whole, Birthday Stories offers an intriguing meditation on growing older and confronting the strange realities that accompany it.

Looking back, I suspect the book has not changed very much since I first read it in 2013.

I have.

And perhaps that is one of the most rewarding aspects of returning to books after many years. Sometimes we revisit them hoping to discover something new within their pages, only to discover that the real change has taken place within ourselves.