Longing for parental love and a return to childhood

Longing for parental love and a return to childhood shapes Hideo Harada’s encounters with the couple in Asakusa who resemble his dead parents. The longing is not simply a wish to recover the past: it is a need to experience, as an adult, the shelter of being a child who can depend on his parents without guarding himself. His visits turn that need into an imagined family life, while the loss of the places and people sustaining it forces him to face the difference between reunion and remembrance.

Childhood security and its loss

Hideo’s most cherished childhood memory is an ordinary return from a demanding school excursion. He would drop the schoolbag his mother had made from an old Imperial Army haversack, take off his clothes, and lie in his underwear on the tatami while she prepared dinner. In that domestic interval he did not have to maintain appearances or stay on guard; he could drift toward sleep in the security of knowing his mother was nearby. The scene gives the longing its measure: what he misses is not an idealized adventure or a particular possession, but the unforced trust of being cared for.

His parents died when he was twelve, and he recalls no comparable moments of complete security in the years afterward. He did find relaxation and refuge during his marriage, but he understands that experience as different from the safety of childhood. The distinction is consequential. Adult companionship could ease worldly cares, yet it did not restore the uncomplicated dependence he associates with his parents.

Difficulty receiving care as an adult

Hideo connects the distance in his marriage to his own reserve. He had believed that a woman’s maternal solicitude properly belonged to her children, and that a husband seeking the same treatment from his wife would distort the relationship. He could not surrender himself to her care or accept being indulged. In retrospect, he sees this not as simple independence but as an incapacity shaped by the loss of his parents: prolonged stress from age twelve had left him poorly equipped to receive other people’s goodwill.

He reasons that children learn to gain love partly by showing an appropriate degree of dependence, a lesson his bereaved adolescence denied him. That deprivation, he believes, gradually chilled his marriage. During the divorce he took the initiative because his wife would not raise the subject, accepted the blame, and gave up most of their assets, including their home and the land beneath it. The experience left him emotionally spent and sharpened his wish to return to a passive role: to be able simply to do as his mother and father said. Parental care answers a need that adult partnership, in his account, had not been able to repair.

Asakusa as a route back

The longing is attached to place as well as memory. On an earlier visit to Asakusa, Hideo had avoided the districts most closely connected to his childhood, including the streets around the International Theater, Honganji Temple, and Tawara-machi Station. He feared finding traces of the family’s former life there and losing control of emotions he had held back since his parents’ deaths. The familiar neighborhood could not be unchanged after more than thirty years, but the possibility of encountering a childhood landmark was powerful enough to make him reluctant to look.

After meeting the couple, the tenderness he remembers in their voices continues to draw him back. He seeks the full light of a summer day partly to test whether the encounter had been shaped by night, and partly to avoid meeting them again under its cover. Yet his doubts do not dissolve the comfort he associates with them. When he later approaches his parents in Asakusa, he has so much to tell them about the years since he was twelve that the approach itself makes him self-conscious. His imagined reunion becomes a chance to address the parents he lost before he could share his adult life with them.

Their time together makes childhood tangible through small, repeated acts. Hideo recalls that he and his father played catch only once in the plaza in front of the International Theater, which is why he had wished to do it again. At Honganji Temple, his father’s first throw strikes Hideo’s glove; Hideo experiences the moment as a return to being twelve. Their game pauses whenever a car passes, and the repeated interruption becomes part of what he treasures. His father’s casual manner also revises Hideo’s childhood image of him: instead of an always formidable figure, he sees a happy-go-lucky man who stays composed when a plan goes wrong and simply sets off another way. The reunion offers not only parental affection but a more intimate, less idealized understanding of his father.

The imagined family and its cost

Hideo recognizes that the encounters may be hallucinations, but he questions whether a comforting vision must therefore be rejected. He knows the couple cannot literally be parents in their thirties to a forty-eight-year-old son; nevertheless, he is willing to accept an imagined world in which that relationship can exist. The woman had identified herself as his mother through words spoken to his back, and they had not yet had an opportunity to speak as parent and child. That incompleteness intensifies the reunion: it is a belated opening of a relationship interrupted when he was twelve.

He imagines that his parents’ renewed existence depends on his attention. Between visits, they may appear to go about work and play, but he fears that the rest of their time could be an empty interval in which they do not exist at all, frozen like figures in a wax museum. In this vision, his own longing gives them life. The idea makes the return emotionally sustaining but precarious: to turn away might mean losing not just access to them, but the imagined world in which they have returned for him.

That attachment conflicts with the cost of visiting. Hideo has promised Kei that he will return soon, and he understands that his parents will wait for him in Asakusa because of that promise. Though he considers whether preserving his own life justifies abandoning them, he cannot accept leaving without a farewell. As evening approaches, he breaks his promise to Kei and goes back. The decision makes the pull of parental love more than a private recollection: it competes directly with his obligations and his instinct for self-preservation.

Farewell, place, and keepsake

When Hideo’s parents begin to grow transparent, the imagined reunion reaches its limit. He sees through his mother’s shoulders and then notices his father fading; later, his father’s shoulders have disappeared and his mother’s face is dim. Hideo cannot stop their departure. He thanks them quietly, conscious of the waitress and other diners nearby, and tries to hold on to what remains by gathering the two pairs of chopsticks they used and wrapping them carefully in a handkerchief. The objects make the farewell physical: when the parents themselves are vanishing, he turns to the utensils left from their shared meal.

The connection continues after the couple are gone, but its form changes. Two years after his last visit to his parents’ grave in Aichi, Hideo returns to the Asakusa site with incense, a burner, and chrysanthemums. The apartment building has been demolished; the lot is empty, forlorn, and overgrown with summer weeds. The vanished building echoes the loss of the family setting, while the weeds make the cleared ground seem strangely apart from its surroundings. At the site, Hideo prays beside Mamiya and thinks of bringing the chopsticks his parents used at their last meal on a future visit, burning them as an offering. The longing that once sought a return to parental care thus becomes a continuing bond carried by memory, ritual, and a small household object. It cannot restore childhood or keep the parents present, but it gives Hideo a way to address them after their disappearance.