Харуки Мураками - Birthday Girl

‘Today just happens to be your twentieth birthday, and on top of that you have brought me this wonderful warm meal,’ the old man said as if reconfirming the situation. Then he set his glass on the desktop with a little thump. ‘This has to be some kind of special convergence, don’t you think?’

Not quite convinced, she managed a nod.

‘Which is why,’ he said, touching the knot of his withered-leaf-coloured necktie, ‘I feel it is important for me to give you a birthday present. A special birthday calls for a special commemorative gift.’

Flustered, she shook her head and said, ‘No, please, sir, don’t give it a second thought. All I did was bring your meal the way they ordered me to.’

The old man raised both hands, palms towards her. ‘No, miss, don’t you give it a second thought. The kind of “present” I have in mind is not something tangible, not something with a price tag. To put it simply –’ he placed his hands on the desk and took one long, slow breath – ‘what I would like to do for a lovely young fairy such as you is to grant a wish you might have, to make your wish come true. Anything. Anything at all that you wish for – assuming that you do have such a wish.’

‘A wish?’ she asked, her throat dry.

‘Something you would like to have happen, miss. If you have a wish – one wish, I’ll make it come true. That is the kind of birthday present I can give you. But you had better think about it very carefully because I can grant you only one.’ He raised a finger. ‘Just one. You can’t change your mind afterwards and take it back.’

She was at a loss for words. One wish? Whipped by the wind, raindrops tapped unevenly at the window pane. As long as she remained silent, the old man looked into her eyes, saying nothing. Time marked its irregular pulse in her ears.

‘I have to wish for something, and it will be granted?’

Instead of answering her question, the old man – hands still side by side on the desk – just smiled. He did it in the most natural and amiable way.

‘Do you have a wish, miss – or not?’ he asked gently.

‘This really did happen,’ she said, looking straight at me. ‘I’m not making it up.’

‘Of course not,’ I said. She was not the sort of person to invent some goofy story out of thin air. ‘So… did you make a wish?’

She went on looking at me for a while, then released a tiny sigh. ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t taking him one hundred per cent seriously myself. I mean, at twenty you’re not exactly living in a fairy-tale world any more. If this was his idea of a joke, though, I had to hand it to him for coming up with it on the spot. He was a dapper old fellow with a twinkle in his eye, so I decided to play along with him. It was my twentieth birthday, after all: I reckoned I ought to have something not-so-ordinary happen to me that day. It wasn’t a question of believing or not believing.’

I nodded without saying anything.

‘You can understand how I felt, I’m sure. My twentieth birthday was coming to an end without anything special happening, nobody wishing me a happy birthday, and all I’m doing is carrying tortellini with anchovy sauce to people’s tables.’

I nodded again. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I understand.’

‘So I made a wish.’

The old man kept his gaze fixed on her, saying nothing, hands still on the desk. Also on the desk were several thick folders that might have been account books, plus writing implements, a calendar and a lamp with a green shade. Lying among them, his small hands looked like another set of desktop furnishings. The rain continued to beat against the window, the lights of Tokyo Tower filtering through the shattered drops.

The wrinkles on the old man’s forehead deepened slightly. ‘That is your wish?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That is my wish.’

‘A bit unusual for a girl your age,’ he said. ‘I was expecting something different.’

‘If it’s no good, I’ll wish for something else,’ she said, clearing her throat. ‘I don’t mind. I’ll think of something else.’

‘No, no,’ the old man said, raising his hands and waving them like flags. ‘There’s nothing wrong with it, not at all. It’s just a little surprising, miss. Don’t you have something else? For example, you want to be prettier, or smarter, or rich: you’re OK with not wishing for something like that – something an ordinary girl would ask for?’

She took some moments to search for the right words. The old man just waited, saying nothing, his hands at rest together on the desk again.

‘Of course I’d like to be prettier or smarter or rich. But I really can’t imagine what would happen to me if any of those things came true. They might be more than I could handle. I still don’t really know what life is all about. I don’t know how it works .’

‘I see,’ the old man said, intertwining his fingers and separating them again. ‘I see.’

‘So, is my wish OK?’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Of course. It’s no trouble at all for me.’

The old man suddenly fixed his eyes on a spot in the air. The wrinkles of his forehead deepened: they might have been the wrinkles of his brain itself as it concentrated on his thoughts. He seemed to be staring at something – perhaps all-but-invisible bits of down – floating in the air. He opened his arms wide, lifted himself slightly from his chair, and whipped his palms together with a dry smack. Settling in the chair again, he slowly ran his fingertips along the wrinkles of his brow as if to soften them, and then turned to her with a gentle smile.

‘That did it,’ he said. ‘Your wish has been granted.’

‘Already?’

‘Yes, it was no trouble at all. Your wish has been granted, lovely miss. Happy birthday. You may go back to work now. Don’t worry, I’ll put the trolley in the hall.’

She took the lift down to the restaurant. Empty-handed now, she felt almost disturbingly light, as though she were walking on some sort of mysterious fluff.

‘Are you OK? You look spaced out,’ the younger waiter said to her.

She gave him an ambiguous smile and shook her head. ‘Oh, really? No, I’m fine.’

‘Tell me about the owner. What’s he like?’

‘I dunno, I didn’t get a very good look at him,’ she said, cutting the conversation short.

An hour later she went to bring the trolley down. It was out in the corridor, utensils in place. She lifted the lid to find the chicken and vegetables gone. The wine bottle and coffee pot were empty. The door to room 604 stood there, closed and expressionless. She stared at it for a time, feeling it might open at any moment, but it did not open. She brought the trolley down in the lift and wheeled it in to the dishwasher. The chef looked blankly at the plate: empty as always.

‘I never saw the owner again,’ she said. ‘Not once. The manager turned out to have just an ordinary stomach ache and went back to delivering the owner’s meal again himself the next day. I left the job after New Year’s, and I’ve never been back to the place. I don’t know, I just felt it was better not to go near there, kind of like a premonition.’

She toyed with a paper coaster, thinking her own thoughts. ‘Sometimes I get the feeling that everything that happened to me on my twentieth birthday was some sort of illusion. It’s as though something happened to make me think that things happened that never really happened at all. But I know for sure that they did happen. I can still bring back vivid images of every piece of furniture and every knick-knack in room 604. What happened to me in there really happened, and it had an important meaning for me, too.’