First published 2019
She is turning twenty on a rainy Friday night in Tokyo, working her shift at the restaurant because the plans she had made fell through. The other waitress calls in sick, the manager has to leave, and suddenly she is alone running the floor. Then the manager returns with an unusual request: take a dinner tray upstairs to the owner, an old man who lives above the restaurant and never comes down, never meets the staff, and never asks for anything. She carries the tray up. The owner turns out to be quiet and courteous, and he asks her a question she does not expect. It is her birthday, he says. He would like to give her something. She can have one wish granted, anything at all. She thinks carefully and makes her choice. The rest of her life unfolds from that room, from that wish, from that one wet Friday when she was twenty years old. Whether the wish worked the way she intended, she is never quite sure. That uncertainty is the thing she carries longest. Murakami published this short work to mark his own seventieth birthday, and it reads like a small, precise object held up to the light.
Genres: short-stories, literary-fiction, contemporary, magical-realism
Vibes: contemplative, intimate, introspective, lyrical, melancholic, mysterious
Tropes: life-altering-moment, magical-encounter, unreliable-memory
Setting: Tokyo
Period: 21st-century, contemporary
48 pages · Paperback · Harvill Secker