August 4 (the narrator’s birthday)

August 4 (the narrator’s birthday) is the date on which Hideo Harada’s unease with his newly independent life turns into a decisive change of direction. On the afternoon of his birthday, he buys himself a necktie while pretending it is a gift for someone else; later, reluctant to repeat another evening at home, he sees Asakusa named on a subway sign and chooses to visit the place where he was born. The date links private embarrassment and dissatisfaction to a return toward family history.

The Birthday and the Disguised Gift

The date is given precisely as August 4, and its importance first appears through a small act that Hideo finds difficult to admit even to himself. Late that afternoon, in a department store in Ginza, he tells a sales clerk that the necktie he is choosing is a gift. The account later reveals that he is buying it for his own birthday. The pretence is not simply a cover for an ordinary purchase: Hideo is disgusted by the sentimentality of treating himself to a birthday present, and regards that gesture as unlike the person he had been when younger. His discomfort makes the birthday a measure of how exposed and uncertain he feels in his new life.

The tie itself gives that uncertainty a visible form. Hideo rejects several dark, subdued ties as too sober, but also recognizes that his search for something different has no clear destination. He leaves with a cream-colored tie marked by bold orange, yellow, and green swaths, despite doubting that he will ever wear it. The conspicuous choice does not resolve his dissatisfaction. Instead, it sits between restraint and excess, matching his sense that he cannot identify what he wants. The birthday purchase is therefore less a celebration than an awkward attempt to make a choice for himself.

A Day Against Routine

By evening, Hideo is resisting the familiar route home. He can already imagine the sequence awaiting him there: a shower, several hours of work in air-conditioned comfort, and whiskey on the sofa while watching a film. It would be an efficient and predictable evening, much like the previous one. On his birthday, that sameness makes his dissatisfaction harder to ignore. He understands that he has sunk into depression and needs to begin living the life opened up by his new independence; the self-gift seems to him evidence of how poorly he is managing that task.

The date does not produce an abstract resolution to change. Its turn comes through the city and through Hideo’s movement within it. As evening descends and sticky heat leaves the streets feeling grimy, he finds that his feet have not taken him directly home. He stops at the entrance to the Ginza subway station, where a sign points in two directions, including toward Asakusa and Ueno. The name Asakusa catches his attention before he has fully understood why. Where the necktie offered a choice that felt unsatisfactory, the sign gives him a destination he can recognize immediately. He decides on the spot to go there and hurries down the stairs.

Asakusa and the Return to Origins

The decision matters because Asakusa is not merely another place to spend the evening. Hideo was born there in 1939, the first child of a sushi chef and a kitchen helper who worked at the same restaurant. His family lived in an apartment near Tawara-machi Station. His last visit had been years earlier, possibly more than a decade, so the name on the sign brings a long interval of absence into the present of his birthday.

The recollection attached to Asakusa carries the history of his family through the war and its aftermath. While his father was away near the end of the war, Hideo and his mother stayed with his maternal grandparents in Tochigi, north of Tokyo. After his father returned from the Philippines in 1946, the family went back to Asakusa. In the difficult postwar period, his parents gathered whatever food they could obtain and sold it in the black market as Vitamin Stew. Hideo, then in grade school, sometimes helped. He remembers his mother thickening the stew by mixing flour and water in a large bowl and stirring it into a bubbling pot. These details give the chosen destination a lived family past, rather than leaving it as a name that simply appeals to him.

Narrative Significance

August 4 concentrates several kinds of transition without making them identical. It is a birthday, but Hideo’s private gift leaves him ashamed rather than content; it falls during a period of newly gained independence, but that freedom has not yet delivered the expanded horizons he imagined. He has even reflected that learning another language or getting divorced would not necessarily free him from his own reticence and habits. His decision to visit Asakusa is more specific and immediate: instead of imagining a transformed life, he goes toward the place that holds his earliest family memories.

The narrative also makes the change in direction legible through a contrast in scale. The brightly colored tie is a purchase Hideo may never use, while the subway sign directs him toward a location bound to his birth and childhood. The first choice leaves him dissatisfied; the second prompts action. Thus the birthday functions as a hinge between an evening he can predict and a past he has not revisited for many years. It does not, by itself, settle what his independence will mean, but it brings him out of his habitual routine and sets his return to Asakusa in motion.