The Birthday Girl

By King Meera -
'The Birthday Girl' is a story within a story.

The narrator, whom we know nothing of except that she is having this conversation, tells us what the other woman tells her about her 20th birthday. Btw, the other woman is over 30, has two children - a boy and a girl, drives an Audi, is married to a CPA 3 years older than herself, they have an Irish settler, and she plays tennis with her girlfriends twice a week. She used to wait tables every Friday at one of the better-known Italian restaurants in the Roppongi district of Tokyo in her student days, which is where her story is set.

O.W. (other woman) had to work on her birthday, Friday, November 17, because her waitress friend who offered to fill in for her became sick. O.W. didn't mind; work would take her mind off of what she had a sinking feeling was a break-up, with her boyfriend since high school. Her story is quite straightforward - she had to deliver dinner to the owner of the restaurant, because the manage, who did it usually, felt pain in his stomach. O.W. delivers him his meal, and he sweetly and politely offers to grant her any one wish, since it is her birthday.

Most of this story is just description: of the break-up, the restaurant, the weather, the restaurant staff, the routine of the waiter-folk, the clientele, the damn elevator, the old man and his quirks etc. The only thing we do not know every minute detail of, is the wish O.W. made. We are not told what she asks for (we only know she didn't ask for beauty or wealth or such things), not given clarity on whether her wish was fulfilled; we have vague hints and mixed signals about whether she regrets having asked for what she asked for or whether she wishes she'd asked for something else.

It seems, though, she's content with her life, and is expecting the rest of her wish to come true over the course of the rest of her life.

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