Postwar Japan

Postwar Japan is the formative period of Hideo Harada’s childhood: a time when war separated him from his father, the family improvised to survive, and everyday life gradually resumed in Asakusa. The novel presents this history through remembered family circumstances and places rather than as a broad account of national events, then sets those memories against a later city in which familiar buildings have disappeared.

Historical Span and Family Circumstances

Hideo Harada was born in Asakusa in 1939, the first child of a sushi chef and a kitchen helper who worked at the same restaurant. The family lived in an apartment near Tawara-machi Station. His father had served in the army twice, once before Hideo’s birth and once afterward; toward the end of the war, while his father was still away, Hideo and his mother went north of Tokyo to stay with his maternal grandparents in Tochigi.

The separation ended after the war when Hideo’s father was repatriated from the Philippines in 1946. The family returned to Asakusa, where his parents made and sold a mixture of whatever edible ingredients they could obtain, calling it Vitamin Stew. Hideo was still in grade school, but he helped. His memory holds the period in a domestic image: his mother mixing flour and water in a large bowl, then stirring it into a bubbling pot as steam rose around her face. Survival appears here not as an abstraction but as work performed in the family’s kitchen and, with a child’s help, carried into the market.

Returning to Work in Asakusa

Around the time the Korean War broke out in 1950, Hideo’s father found regular work again as a sushi chef. The shop was in Nihonbashi, but his parents preferred to remain in Asakusa. They rented an apartment on the second floor of a tinsmith’s house behind Honganji Temple, keeping the family’s home in the neighborhood even after the father’s employment took him elsewhere each day.

The account also touches on a future that did not come to pass: Hideo’s mother became pregnant with a second child in that apartment, but he never learned whether the baby would have been a boy or a girl. This unresolved detail sits within the family’s return to a more settled life, leaving the postwar household defined not only by the work regained and home maintained, but also by an absence that remained unknowable.

Childhood Place and the Return of Memory

As an adult, Hideo Harada recalls that he had not visited Asakusa for years, perhaps more than a decade. His earlier trips had kept him away from the streets most closely connected to childhood: the area around the International Theater, Honganji Temple, and Tawara-machi Station. He feared finding the old tinsmith’s house still standing, because such a sight might release the grief he had held back since his parents died when he was twelve. The childhood neighborhood was therefore both a physical destination and a storehouse of feeling he had tried not to reopen.

On a later visit, he gets off at Tawara-machi Station rather than continuing to the end of the line at Asakusa. His lingering attachment to the district shows in his recollection of correcting a television news anchor’s pronunciation of the station’s name: although he rarely returned, he still felt loyal to his hometown. Yet the approach is not a simple restoration of the past. In the present-day streets, he expects that the places of childhood may have changed beyond recognition; memory draws him toward them while apprehension makes him hesitate.

Redevelopment and the Persistence of the Past

The old apartment building eventually proves to be gone. When Hideo returns to its site with Mamiya, he learns that the building was demolished in May and finds an empty lot where it stood. Weeds have spread across the enclosed ground, making the small space seem strangely separate from its surroundings. The change turns an anticipated encounter with a surviving childhood landmark into a confrontation with absence: the place remains locatable, but the building that gave it its remembered form has vanished.

Hideo marks the visit with incense and a small bouquet of chrysanthemums. His parents’ ashes are buried in Aichi, and he says it has been two years since his last visit to the family grave. He and Mamiya pray beside the lot, while Hideo thinks of returning with the chopsticks his parents used at their last meal, to burn them and pray again. The gesture links the childhood home to portable objects and repeated acts of remembrance. In this account, the postwar past does not survive intact in the cityscape; it persists through Hideo’s memories, the names of neighborhood places, and the rituals he carries to the ground where the family once lived.