Hideo visits Asakusa by day and is recognized as her son by his mother in an encounter that turns an uncertain nighttime reunion into an apparent family relationship. His return is an attempt to test what happened against ordinary daylight, but the woman’s unhesitating recognition of him as a child of the Harada family deepens rather than resolves the uncertainty. The visit first sends him fleeing in terror; later, it helps draw him back into an imagined family life with his deceased parents, which ends in a final farewell and the preservation of their chopsticks.

Background and the Daylight Test

After his parents died when he was twelve, Hideo had kept away from the Asakusa streets most closely bound to his childhood. On an earlier visit, he had avoided the International Theater and the neighborhoods around Honganji Temple and Tawara-machi Station, fearing that an intact remnant of the family’s old life might break through the emotional defenses he had maintained for decades. The past was not merely a memory to him: a familiar place could bring grief into the present with a force he did not know how to manage.

Following a first, extraordinary nighttime encounter with a couple resembling his parents, Hideo initially felt an urgent pull to return. His developing relationship with Kei displaced that impulse for a time, but the couple’s invitation stayed with him. He wondered whether darkness had distorted what he saw and wanted to test the encounter in the clear light of day. After spending the next two days working on a proposal, he set out for Asakusa shortly after noon on the third day. The trip was therefore both a return to a childhood landscape and an effort to establish whether the apparent reunion could withstand ordinary observation.

Recognition at the Apartment

The apartment did not disappear or prove impossible to find. Hideo stood on the second-floor walkway and saw the last door, where the couple lived, open. A blue plastic pail held it in place, apparently to let air pass through. Knowing that his footsteps on the metal stairs might have carried through the building, he walked briskly along the walkway and knocked at the open doorway rather than lingering outside.

The woman inside greeted him as though his arrival were expected. She looked, in every discernible way, like his mother when young, and was kneeling at a low table on the tatami, turning a crank attached to a plastic container. Hideo apologized for arriving without notice. The domestic ordinariness of the scene—an open door, a household task, a familiar face—stood beside the strangeness of seeing a woman who appeared to belong to his childhood in a present-day apartment.

As he prepared to leave, Hideo asked the woman her name, explaining that there was no nameplate by the door. She answered without hesitation that the family name was Harada, then laughed at the idea that a child would need to ask his own parents their name. Her response made explicit what the resemblance alone could not establish: within the encounter, she regarded Hideo as her son. Yet Hideo had not introduced himself as a child, and the recognition offered no ordinary explanation for how she knew him. He could not turn to face her as he answered that the heat must have affected him.

Fear, Return, and an Imagined Family

Hideo tried to leave at a normal pace, but his fear intensified as he descended the metal stairs, and he eventually ran into the shopping street. He hailed a cab, then waved it away when the prospect of being alone with the driver frightened him: he imagined the driver might turn and have his father’s face. On the way to Tawara-machi Station, he looked anxiously behind him, afraid that his mother might be following. That evening, a violent thunderstorm passed over Tokyo. From a high-floor hotel bar, he watched the rain and lightning blur behind the glass and dreaded returning to his empty apartment, recognizing that his fear was directed as much at himself as at the place.

In retrospect, Hideo considered whether the Asakusa encounters might have been hallucinations, but he questioned whether that possibility made them harmful. They brought comfort and strength and occurred when he went to Asakusa, rather than intruding on his work or home life. He also recognized that the daylight visit had not yet become a conversation between parent and child: it was only from words spoken behind him that he had learned the woman was his mother. Still, he could imagine accepting a world in which parents in their thirties could welcome their forty-eight-year-old son. He wondered whether his own longing had given life to the couple, and whether, between his visits, they existed only as figures suspended in an unfinished moment. The recognition that had first terrified him thus became part of the emotional logic that drew him back.

Later visits developed the apparent reunion into shared family routines. In August, when many Tokyo residents had left the city for Obon, Hideo and his father looked for a place to play catch. His father found two worn baseball gloves in the futon closet. The gloves recalled Hideo’s childhood wish to play with his father, who had usually been occupied with baseball among his sushi-shop friends and had considered a regulation ball too dangerous for a small child. Although the largely shuttered shops and reduced traffic made the streets quieter, they could not play catch in the road. The small failed outing nevertheless let Hideo imagine his father as an easygoing man who could shrug off a mistaken plan and find another way forward.

Farewell and What Remains

The visits eventually approached an ending Hideo did not want to accept. During a final walk with his parents, he suggested going to Sensō-ji to pray to the Goddess of Mercy and browse the shops. His father said they were not free to do whatever they wished, and his mother answered through tears. Hideo nearly withdrew his promise that it would be his last visit, but the family continued toward Kaminarimon Gate. Crossing International Boulevard, they passed a shop grilling skewered lamprey livers; his father suggested that each of them have one. The ordinary invitation made their silence after leaving the apartment newly apparent, and the outing retained the shape of a family evening even as it became a leave-taking.

At the restaurant, Hideo’s parents began to fade. He could see through his mother’s shoulders, and his father’s shoulders and torso were disappearing. Hideo understood that he could not stop them from leaving and stayed fixed on them as his father’s shoulders vanished and his mother’s face dimmed. He thanked them before they disappeared. Afterward, exhausted, he gathered the two pairs of chopsticks they had used, wrapped them carefully in a handkerchief, and kept them as something tangible from their last meal together.

Two years later, at the family grave in Aichi, Hideo brought incense and a small bouquet of chrysanthemums. The ashes of his parents were buried there, and Mamiya prayed beside him. Hideo thought that he could bring the chopsticks on a future visit and burn them in prayer. The object links the invented or supernatural family reunion to a real act of remembrance: the parents’ recognition of him cannot be verified, but the chopsticks preserve the fact of a shared meal and give him a reason to return to the grave.

Narrative Significance

The event’s movement is from deliberate avoidance, to daylight verification, to panic, and finally to repeated return. Daylight does not settle whether the couple are his parents, hallucinations, or something between those explanations. Instead, the woman’s recognition supplies a family identity that Hideo had not expected to hear, making uncertainty emotionally consequential rather than merely puzzling. The encounter also recasts his trip through Asakusa: the city’s streets are not only changed urban spaces but places where childhood memory can become an apparent present.

The later farewell does not erase the reunion or demand that Hideo relinquish every attachment to his parents. Its ending shifts the connection from their visible presence to a portable, ordinary remnant of family life. The chopsticks, first collected in the exhaustion of parting and later imagined as an offering at the grave, carry the relationship beyond the visits. The event therefore marks both a return to the emotional world of childhood and the beginning of a way to remember his parents after that world has receded.