Ghosts

Ghosts are the novel’s means of making grief both intimate and dangerous: the dead can seem to return to ordinary family life, yet contact with them is bound to loss and physical cost. Hideo Harada’s parents appear in Asakusa as the young adults they were when he was a child, while Kei’s identity as a ghost emerges through other people’s perceptions and her own account of what she can do. The narrative leaves room for uncertainty about Hideo’s early visions, but the final departures of his parents and Kei give that uncertainty a consequential shape.

Identity and Uncertainty

Hideo does not initially treat the Asakusa experience as an established supernatural fact. He considers the possibility that the events occurred entirely in his mind, and asks himself whether occasional, comforting hallucinations are necessarily harmful. Because the visions come when he visits Asakusa rather than intruding into his home or work, he sees them as a source of warmth and strength, not something he needs to banish. The uncertainty matters: the parents’ apparent return can be read as an encounter with the dead or as an expression of Hideo’s longing for them.

That longing is bound up with a striking reversal of generations. Hideo is forty-eight, while the parents who welcome him appear to be in their thirties. He recognizes that such a family could not exist in the ordinary world, yet is willing to accept an imagined one in which he can again be their son. He understands the visions as giving form to an “eternal child” in himself, and imagines that his parents’ existence between visits may depend on his returning to them. This possibility makes the apparitions more than comforting images: in Hideo’s mind, his attention may be what lets them live again.

Returns and Recognition

The appearances unfold against a city marked by the seasonal absence of its residents. In August, Hideo learns that many shops are closed and Tokyo is nearly deserted until the seventeenth, because people have gone home for the Bon festival to welcome returning spirits. The festival provides a cultural frame for the possibility of the dead coming back, without resolving whether Hideo’s parents are literally present. His private family reunion takes place amid a wider observance centered on the return of the dead.

The parents’ youth makes their relationship to Hideo seem impossible, but their welcome answers a deep personal need. Hideo recalls having known the joy of loved ones’ smiles for a time with his wife and when his son was a toddler; he does not describe his life as wholly deprived of affection. Even so, he recognizes the force of his yearning for his parents’ smiling faces. The visions therefore hold two truths together: Hideo has experienced love in his adult life, and the wish to be received again as a child remains powerful.

Danger, Attachment, and Protection

The story’s treatment of ghosts becomes more troubling as Hideo grows physically weak. After he has been unable to rise without exhausting himself, Kei lies beside him in a protective, almost maternal manner. Hideo is frightened, and his earlier willingness to die for his parents has given way to desperate prayer. When Kei sees his condition, she recognizes that the man before her is not well enough to move about as he claims; the passage connects Hideo’s apparent vitality to a supernatural power associated with the world his parents belong to.

Other characters interpret the danger differently. Kei regards Hideo’s parents as vengeful spirits who should be avoided, a view that pains him because he feels compelled to stand by them. Mamiya, in turn, becomes alarmed after seeing through the narrow opening of Hideo’s apartment door as if Kei’s body were not blocking it. Although he first doubts his perception, he returns because Hideo has looked gravely unwell and he does not trust Kei’s reassurance. His response shows how a ghost may be identified indirectly, through a failure of ordinary sight, before the person affected accepts the implications.

When Mamiya confronts Kei, he raises his rosary and recites Namu Myoho Rengekyo, treating the encounter as one that calls for spiritual defense. Hideo refuses to turn against Kei merely because he knows she is a ghost: he remembers her care for him and fears that rejecting her would leave him with an empty future. The decisive explanation comes from Kei. She says she cannot drain Hideo’s lifeblood because, by the time he came out of the apartment, his heart was no longer with her. The episode makes emotional attachment a condition of her power over him, while also revealing that spoken promises of togetherness do not necessarily match the heart’s actual state.

Departures and Continuing Bonds

The parents’ return ends in visible disappearance. During a meal, as Hideo speaks of his failures as a husband and father and doubts that he deserves their warmth, he realizes he can see through his mother’s shoulders. His father begins to fade as well. Hideo understands that this is how they will leave and cannot stop it; he stays focused on them, thanks them, and hears his mother say goodbye as her face dims. The scene turns the apparitions’ fading bodies into an unmistakable separation, rather than an open-ended promise of further visits.

Hideo is left too exhausted to grieve in the ordinary way, but he acts to preserve something tangible. He gathers the two pairs of chopsticks his parents used, wraps them carefully in a handkerchief, and struggles to manage the bill. The chopsticks carry the intimacy of a shared meal into the world that remains after the apparitions are gone. Later, at the family grave in Aichi, he brings incense, a burner, and chrysanthemums; he and Mamiya light incense and pray together. Hideo plans to bring and burn the chopsticks at a future visit. The ritual does not restore his parents, but gives his attachment a form that can continue without pretending they are still physically present.

Kei’s disappearance repeats the parents’ vanishing in a different register. After Hideo chooses to remain connected to her, she begins to fade until only an afterimage remains in the seventh-floor hallway; no blood is left behind. Across both encounters, the dead offer care and companionship, but their presence cannot be made permanent. Ghosts thus embody the tension between longing and the boundary of death: Hideo’s visits can revive a relationship in feeling, while farewell, prayer, and the saved chopsticks mark the limits of reunion.