Autumn

Autumn is the season that makes Hideo Harada’s return to Asakusa feel like a reckoning with time. After the summer visits and farewells, he walks back through the changing city with Mamiya, recognizing that the season has turned and that the people he encountered can no longer return.

Summer and the Obon setting

In August, the narrator explains, much of Tokyo empties as people travel to the countryside for the Obon Festival and welcome the returning spirits of the dead. The observance gives the quiet beer hall and the closed shops a seasonal explanation: the city’s stillness is not simply a matter of the hour. When Hideo and his father try to find somewhere to play catch, the shuttered stores offer no suitable space, and the traffic remains too active for them to throw a ball in the street. The holiday thus places an ordinary family outing within a month already associated with the dead returning.

A violent thunderstorm also passes over the city during this stretch of the story. Watching from a high-rise hotel, Hideo sees rain blur the glass and reduce lightning to diffuse flickers. The darkness advancing even into the bright, elevated space reflects his dread of returning to an empty apartment and being alone with himself. The storm belongs to the summer sequence rather than marking autumn’s arrival, but it establishes a contrast between the brightness Hideo seeks and the darkness he cannot keep out.

A farewell in the deepening dusk

As Hideo’s last visit with his parents draws to a close, the three leave the apartment and walk toward Kaminarimon Gate, crossing International Boulevard. They pass a shop grilling skewered eel livers; his father stops and suggests that they each have one. Only then does Hideo realize that none of them has spoken since leaving. The small pause for food interrupts the silence without undoing the separation gathering around them.

Hideo proposes going to the temple to pray to the Goddess of Mercy and browsing the shops on the way. His father answers that they are not free to do whatever they wish, and his mother’s tears make plain how difficult that limit is for her. The suggestion of a familiar outing becomes a measure of what they cannot continue to do together. Later, as his father disappears and his mother grows dim, Hideo thanks them quietly and watches rather than looking away. The farewell is inseparable from the dusk: the figures he has briefly regained are already receding from view.

The arrival of autumn

Two days after leaving the hospital, Hideo sets out for Asakusa with Mamiya. Mamiya is concerned the journey may distress him, but Hideo believes he has already found emotional closure and that neither his parents nor Kei will appear again. Emerging at Tawara-machi Station, they walk along International Boulevard through busy traffic. Hideo notices that summer has ended: despite the fumes, he can smell autumn, and pedestrians move with livelier steps than they did in the summer heat.

The season’s change gathers the story’s separate losses into one perception. Hideo thinks of a season passing, and with it his parents and Kei. Autumn is not presented as a restoration or a promise that those encounters will resume; it gives their ending a visible place in the year. His return with Mamiya therefore marks movement back into the living city while acknowledging that the summer’s contact with the dead is over.