Years ago, a certain sage — well, a blind date who never made it to a second meeting — offered me this wisdom: “Get too hung up on birthdays and anniversaries, and life gets exhausting.”
Quite right. I couldn’t agree more. But I am the sort of person who, given the choice between boredom and exhaustion, will take exhaustion every time. So each year I agonize, in earnest, over how to spend the one birthday allotted to me. The small voice that asks why I bother marking something as unwelcome as getting older gets smothered by another: Nothing much happens in this life. Isn’t it nice to have an occasion now and then? My birthday is in January, which means that by early December I am already deep into planning the stretch that runs from Christmas to my birthday.
The objective is simple: on that one day, to run as hard as I can from any feeling of unhappiness. I have had plenty of birthdays on which nothing whatsoever happened, and none of them left much of a mark. If it falls on a weekday, I go to the office like any other day, deliberately leave an hour late (partly to dodge the rush hour, partly to demonstrate to myself that today is nothing special), pick up whatever I’m craving on the way home, eat a slow dinner, and it’s midnight before I know it. If it falls on a weekend, I stay in and declare an Official Cheat Day: high-calorie food and Netflix, morning till night. The one hazard is the moment the series I’ve been bingeing ends and the screen goes black. That is when “It’s my birthday, and what am I doing?” can slip in and strike an undefended heart. Danger sign.
A partner proves useful on your birthday. Simply knowing there is someone to spend it with lifts a weight from the whole end of the year. When there is no such person, I go looking for a birthday partner.
Sometime in my 30s, having quit my job and moved to Japan to study, I decided I did not want to spend my birthday in a foreign city without a single close friend, in a dormitory room so dried out by the heater that my lips cracked. So, well in advance, I asked a friend I was reasonably close to at the time — though not close enough that we marked each other’s birthdays.
“Are you free on the Xth?” (my birthday)
“No plans. Why?”
“Right. Let’s have dinner that evening, then.”
As if it were any other day, we ate at a family restaurant and then shared a small slice of cake at a cafe in Ginza, where I announced: “It’s my birthday today!” My friend was startled, and asked why I hadn’t said so earlier, but didn’t seem especially put out. I remember the wind on the back streets of Ginza as we walked home, talking — cold, bordering on bracing. And the relief of having gotten through the day without being seized by unhappiness or loneliness. From then on I had a routine of my own: birthdays are spent with the best friend of the season.
The best friend of the season has sometimes been a colleague in my department I had recently grown close to, sometimes a source who happened to be free that day. Sometimes, after a long detour, it has been a best friend of 20 years standing before me on my birthday. Whoever it is, having the date fixed well in advance brings peace of mind (I’m a capital J, for those who speak Myers-Briggs), and it lets me answer, head held high, the text from my mother that arrives without fail on the morning of my birthday.
“My darling daughter, have a happy birthday.”
“Will do. Having fun — don’t you worry.”
It is entirely fine — of course it is — if the friend brings no present, and if no waiter appears with a cake and candles. Getting me through the faintly embarrassing hours of a birthday: that is the greatest gift of all.
Then came the crisis. During the pandemic, when meeting anyone at all felt like a criminal act, making plans was tantamount to conspiracy, and finding a birthday partner was no easy matter.
My first birthday after returning to Tokyo as a correspondent fell, mercifully, on a weekend, so I holed up at home and binged “Juhan Shuttai!” (the title means, roughly, “Going to Reprint!”), the drama I rely on as a tonic for the soul. Perhaps I started too early. When the series ended around 5 p.m., the hollowness that rushed in proved too much for me. I headed straight to the department store and ended the day by presenting myself with the expensive winter coat I had been eyeing.
For the second birthday, I made plans a month ahead with an office colleague who had since become a close friend, and I scoured the city for the right place. I booked a tasting menu at a restaurant that, with advance notice, would write “Happy birthday” in chocolate on the dessert plate. The plan was to do my makeup with particular care that morning, go in to work, and leave a little early together for dinner. But on the morning of the day itself, a text arrived from the person I’d had dinner with the night before: “Got sick last night, went to the hospital at dawn and tested positive for Covid. You should get tested too. I’m sorry.” I rushed to the hospital for a test. Negative, thank goodness. With a whoop, I straightened my mask and ran to the restaurant.
For my last birthday in Japan, a friend flew in from Korea — a real best friend, who had spent many birthdays with me since we were grown. She arrived in the afternoon, walked into my apartment and, before anything else, rummaged through her suitcase and produced a thermos. “I didn’t think they’d have miyeokguk in Japan, so I made some at dawn.” Tokyo has a Korean restaurant on every other block, and you can buy the seaweed soup Koreans eat on birthdays at any supermarket. But I was touched all the same, my friend.
(For the record, the Japanese eat soba on birthdays, as a wish for long life.)
My friend spent the birthday weekend with me and took a Monday morning flight home. Late that night, back from the office, I pulled back the comforter and found a picture book she had left on the bed. It was “To You at the End of the World,” by Gauthier David and Marie Caudry, a French husband-and-wife team of author and illustrator.
The book is one long letter from a bear to a bird. The two meet in a northern land and become friends, but when winter comes the bird flies off to the warm south. (It was a migratory bird, after all.) Missing the bird more each day, the bear sets out for “the end of the world,” a place it has never been, to find its friend. The first letter goes like this:
To my bird,
Did you arrive safely on that southern island, where the sun is warm?
I miss you already.
How wonderful the summer we spent together was!
But you hurried away before the winter came.
Why must we part every year?
Over mountains and across waters the bear travels toward the end of the world. It passes through a dark, empty forest; crossing the sea, it is caught in a fisherman’s net. It loses its way in the fog; some days it crosses a desert, enduring its thirst. And then: at the end of the world, reached at last, the friend is not there. The bird, unable to bear its own longing, had braved the cold and flown back north.
And then the scene, after every twist and turn, where the bear and the bird find each other and hold on.
I remember the time we spent together.
Wait for me. I’m coming.
I’m coming to you.
Tucked between the pages was a note in a familiar hand: “Happy birthday. Thank you for being the one who sees the side of me nobody else does.”
I cried a little, on and off, and fell asleep.
It was the best birthday ever.
