At long last, the air has begun to feel like autumn. I hope you’re all keeping well. It is, after all, the season of appetite. This weekend might be the perfect time to gather the family around the table.
For example… curry sounds nice, doesn’t it?
Today’s featured essay is a story born from memories of curry and the weekend.
Oyako Day Essay Contest 2018 — Prize-Winning Entries
Saturday’s Sazae-san
“The day you were born, we were at Grandma’s house, eating curry and watching Sazae-san.”
This is one of those stories my mother has told me several times from the day I was born up to the present.
By some strange twist of fate, I grew up to become an adult who loves curry and even records Sazae-san so I never miss an episode.
My mother always ends the story the same way.
“And that’s why you were definitely born on a Sunday. Children born on Sundays are lucky.”
Thanks in part to this tale, I’ve lived with a healthy confidence in my own good fortune.
During entrance exams, during job hunting—those words always encouraged me somewhere in the back of my mind.
For the record, I failed the entrance exam.
One day, though, with time to kill, I was idly checking the calendar of the year I was born on my smartphone when I discovered a shocking fact:
My birthday was a Saturday.
Well then. That certainly explains the failed exams and my losing streak at job interviews.
I immediately asked my mother again about the day I was born, careful not to reveal what I had found.
Sure enough, she said the same thing:
“We were eating curry and watching Sazae-san.”
Curry I can accept. But could anyone really mistake a memory as vivid as Sazae-san?
Of course, I know Sazae-san used to air on Tuesdays long ago.
But the real issue here is Saturday.
I considered the possibility of a recording, but unfortunately no one in my family was enough of a Sazae-san fanatic to tape it for later viewing.
At this point, I even began to suspect an error in the official documents.
Surely it is more likely that a busy doctor wrote down the wrong date than that Sazae-san suddenly aired on a Saturday.
Or perhaps the Sazae-san my mother saw was some kind of labor-induced vision passing before her eyes.
This story, which has encouraged me for over twenty years, will now likely become one of those maddening mysteries that slips into my thoughts whenever I least expect it.
And when I start brooding over things like this, I can’t concentrate on anything else.
For now, I think I’ll make curry for dinner.
Female, 23
Kyoto City
