Tokyo in Hideo Harada’s story is a city of sharp contrasts: relentless traffic outside his apartment, near-total silence within it at night, and streets where childhood memory meets the physical disappearance of familiar places. Its urban rhythms shape his solitude, while Asakusa, his birthplace, draws him back toward the history he had tried to keep at a distance.

Urban setting and daily rhythms

Harada lives in a seven-story apartment building facing Tokyo Route 8, a busy road where traffic continues around the clock. When he first moved in full time, midnight trucks kept him awake: their rumbling would subside at a nearby traffic light, then return at a higher pitch as they accelerated. The sound made him feel short of breath and trapped; it took about ten days to adjust. Even later, the road remains an imposing presence. On a hot afternoon, its traffic brings fumes and noise to the window, and a walk along the route means breathing through thick car and truck exhaust.

The city’s activity does not prevent an unnerving emptiness from taking hold after dark. From his seventh-floor window, Harada sees a parking lot that empties as night falls, leaving a single pink van decorated with three smiling squirrels. When he looks across the building’s southeast face, his is the only illuminated window. The contrast between the busy highway and the black apartment windows makes Tokyo’s density feel strangely compatible with isolation: the city is present as noise, yet the neighboring residents seem to vanish overnight.

That nightly quiet is shared, at least sometimes, by Harada and the woman next door. She tells him that around that hour they are the building’s only remaining occupants. Morning reverses the scene as office workers bring the building back to life: heels click along the concrete floors, doors latch, telephones ring, and voices rise. Activity reaches the neighboring apartment, where office staff begin their day. The shift from near-silence to ordinary workday bustle makes the building a small measure of Tokyo’s changing pace across the day.

Asakusa and the remembered city

On his birthday, with evening descending and the heat leaving the streets grimy, Harada resists returning to his familiar routine at home. At a Ginza subway entrance, the name Asakusa stops him: it is his birthplace, and he decides to go there. He has not visited for years, perhaps more than a decade. His journey through Tokyo thus begins not as a planned return to family history but as a sudden turn away from an evening that would otherwise have repeated itself.

The subway grows emptier as it travels toward Asakusa. After passing through Nihonbashi, Kanda, and Ueno, Harada reaches the end of the line among only a few remaining passengers in each car. The nearly empty train contrasts with the bright, bustling streets he finds at dusk. He passes through Kaminarimon Gate and walks among the shops on the approach to Sensō-ji, but hesitates to visit the districts most closely connected to his childhood: the area around the International Theater, Honganji Temple, and Tawara-machi Station.

Those streets carry more than geographic significance. Harada fears finding the tinsmith’s shop where he and his parents spent their last days and months together. Since their deaths, when he was twelve, he has allowed himself few tears; he imagines that a vivid reminder of their life there could break through the emotional defenses he has maintained. Tokyo’s transformation offers no simple reassurance. He knows the International Theater has long since given way to a modern hotel, yet even the possibility that some childhood landmark might remain makes the return emotionally dangerous.

Redevelopment and what remains

Later, Harada returns to the old district by getting off at Tawara-machi Station. He remembers once angrily correcting a television news anchor who pronounced the station name differently, a small sign that loyalty to his hometown persisted even when he rarely visited. Now the midsummer sun falls on the shabby, discolored streets as he makes his way to the couple he has been visiting, carrying doubts that weigh on the journey.

The apartment building associated with those visits is eventually gone. When Harada and Mamiya go to look for it, they find an empty lot: the building was demolished in May, and surrounding structures are also expected to be removed for a new building. The small parcel, bounded by the dingy walls of its neighbors and overgrown with summer weeds, seems almost otherworldly amid the surrounding lack of greenery. Urban redevelopment has not merely altered the view; it has erased the particular place to which Harada had returned.

At the lot, remembrance becomes a physical act. Harada opens a cloth bundle containing incense, a burner, and chrysanthemums wrapped in newspaper; it has been two years since he last visited the family grave in Aichi, where his parents’ ashes are buried. He and Mamiya burn incense and pray. Harada then thinks of bringing his parents’ old chopsticks on a future visit, turning the vanished Tokyo site into a reason to return again. The city cannot restore the building or the childhood world attached to it, but the act of carrying objects and making another visit allows remembrance to persist after the place itself has changed.