[Nesacat]

Here's another way to celebrate a birthday. Haruki Murakami's birthday is on Jan 12. It's not something he usually bothers about aside from opening a really good bottle of wine named after Jack London who is Murakami's favourite author.

But this time, while making breakfast at some unhuman hour of the morning, he hears his birthday mentioned on the radio as part of a list of important events for the day.

Suddenly, this day which comes around with relentless inevitability once a year is a 'public event'. It's not just for him anymore. So he decides, why not and goes the whole nine yards and puts out a birthday book.

On the cover it says: Haruki Murakami invites you to share a selection of Birthday Stories with an introduction and his own Birthday Girl.

Date: A Timeless Anthology
RSVP: The Harvill Press

The book collects a dozen tales about birthdays. His own tale coming in right at the end.

He got the idea of this anthology after consecutively reading Timothy's Birthday by William Trevor and The Moor by Russell Banks.

He then added Lynda Sexson's The Emperor Who Had No Skin and Raymond Carver's The Bath, which he had translated into Japanese before.

A Game of Dice, featured in Paul Theroux's Hotel Honolulu, which he happened to be reading at the time, so this tale was added too.

He found Daniel Lyons' The Birthday Cake quite by chance while flipping through the pages of a book he owned.

A totally unrelated event reminded Murakami of Denis Johnson's Dundun. That gave him seven stories, but he needed more.

He decided to turn to friends.

His agent in New York found him Andrea Lee's The Birthday Present and a friend alerted him to Ethan Canin's Angel of Mercy, Angel of Wrath and David Foster Wallace's Forever Overhead.

Finally, he decided that he would crash his own party and write a birthday story of his own, hence Birthday Girl, which tells the story of a girl's lonely 20th birthday one rainy night in Tokyo and the granting of a wish.

Surprisingly almost all the stories are dark and melancholy. Perhaps the usual bubbles of happiness surrounding birthdays tends to send writers in the opposite direction to write about un-birthdays as it were.

The Bath is a tale of a child who is run over and falls into a coma on his birthday.

In Timothy's Birthday, a young man, feuding with his parents can't (and won't) bring himself to go home on his birthday.

In Dundun, a man, messed up on drugs accidentally shoots his best friend.

The Birthday Cake gives us a lonely old woman who stubbornly refuses to give a birthday cake to a young girl who will otherwise have none.

In The Emperor Who Had No Skin, three old ladies come to a little boy's bithday and tell him the tale of the emperor who had no skin. It's a unsettling tale this. Read it and you'll understand why.

Angel of Mercy, Angel of Wrath takes us to the home of a crotchety old lady. Two crows fly into her home one morning and during her dealings with the animals and the lady from the animal shelter we see her change and her attitude soften somewhat.

The Moor is one of my favourite tales. The title is elegant and in the tale a middle-aged man and an old woman meet unexpectedly one snowy night and recall their past love afair.

Forever Overhead depicts a quiet summer day in the life of a boy on the verge of adulthood. The details, the sensual descriptions of smell and light and the touch of the wind are superb.

In dealing with the theme of giving a 'lover for the night' to one's companion as a birthday gift, The Birthday Present and A Game Of Dice are in a kind of gentle competition, though from opposite gender positions. Both stories leave the reader rather unsure whether to judge the ending as happy or unhappy.

And like Murakami, I too remain undecided whether it is necessary to go to such lengths for a birthday present. Like him, I think I too would just get totally stressed out and probably slip out quietly through the nearest exit.

It was a pleasurable read. All the stories are very different and come from very, very different writers. They all talk about something integral to all our lives. And whether or not the event gets reported on the radio, a birthday is special to at least one person.

Like him, I hope that all who read this might find a tale they would wish to read on their birthday every year. Seems as good an annual tradition as any and perhaps better than many.