Book cover of Birthday Stories  edited by Haruki Murakami featuring minimalist design and birthday-themed imagery. There is something quietly unsettling about birthdays once you cross a certain age. The cake is still sweet, the candles still flicker, but beneath the ritual there is an inventory being taken. What did I become this year? What slipped away unnoticed?   That is the emotional temperature of Birthday Stories, curated by Haruki Murakami — not festive, not nostalgic

I opened Stories of Courage on a day when nothing dramatic was happening in my life—and that’s exactly why it unsettled me. No crisis. No breaking news. Just an ordinary day. Yet within a few pages, the ground under that ordinariness began to shift. Not violently. Gently. The way perspective changes when you overhear someone else’s truth on a bus or at a café table. You keep reading, but part of you has already gone inward, recalibrating what you complain about, what you fear