Harada sees his own deterioration in the Mirror and collapses when Kei leads him to face his reflection. The scene overturns his confident belief that he looks healthy: after sudden, overwhelming weakness, he sees a gaunt old man where he expected his usual ruddy face. Kei’s desperate appeal for help and her effort to hold him upright make the Mirror encounter both a revelation and a physical crisis, exposing the cost of the life he has been living in Asakusa.

Background and Emotional Stakes

The encounter follows Harada’s visits to Asakusa, where he has experienced what may be hallucinations of his deceased parents. He recognizes that the episodes could be entirely imaginary, yet they are pleasant and comforting, confined to his visits there, and leave him with a sense of strength. Rather than reject them simply because they may not be real, he considers whether embracing them might be harmless.

The imagined reunion answers a powerful longing. Harada has learned that the woman is his mother only because she speaks to his back; they have not yet had the chance to speak as mother and child. The couple appear to be in their thirties, while their son is forty-eight, a relationship that cannot belong to the ordinary world. Harada nevertheless accepts the impossible arrangement because it lets him imagine his parents welcoming him into their Asakusa home.

He also understands that his yearning is not simply proof that he has never known affection. He recalls having briefly experienced the joy of loved ones greeting him with his wife, and later with his son when the boy was a toddler. He attributes the force of his desire for his parents’ smiles instead to the eternal child within him. This helps explain why the visions offer comfort, but also why giving them up feels like more than correcting a mistaken belief.

Harada imagines that his parents exist anew in Asakusa for his sake, while the intervals between his visits may be a void in which they do not exist at all. He pictures them frozen mid-activity, like figures in a wax museum, and wonders whether he alone can breathe life into them. The thought turns his visits into a fragile responsibility: refusing the fantasy could mean extinguishing the renewed life he has given them in his mind.

Kei Leads Him to the Mirror

Kei summons Harada to come with her and grips his right arm, pulling him toward the bathroom. There, the two stand side by side before the Mirror as they have once before. The familiar setting makes the confrontation pointed: this is not an unfamiliar image or an incidental glance, but a scene Kei deliberately brings about because she wants him to see what he has not acknowledged.

At first, Harada trusts his own appearance. The reflection seems to show his usual ruddy complexion, and he judges himself strong and well-colored. Kei rejects that assessment. She wraps her arms tightly around his neck and cries out for someone to help him, pleading repeatedly as though appealing to a force beyond him. Harada cannot identify whom she is asking, but the sincerity of her plea astonishes him. He recognizes that she is praying for another person’s welfare and is momentarily at a loss before such fervent concern.

Her plea does not remain an expression of fear at a distance. Kei clings to him as if for dear life, and Harada suddenly feels an overwhelming fatigue. She seems heavy on his shoulders; his legs waver, give way, and he sinks to the floor gasping for breath. He cannot explain the abrupt weakness, describing himself as utterly drained. The collapse changes the scene from an argument over what he sees into a bodily demonstration that something is wrong.

The Reflection and Its Consequences

Kei insists that Harada look again and struggles to lift him from the floor to the height of the Mirror. She wedges a hand beneath his right arm, wraps herself around him, and strains until she can raise him enough to see. Through the haze of exhaustion, Harada recognizes an old man. The face has deeply sunken eyes, cavernous cheeks, and colorless skin, as pale as a ghost. The recognition is immediate and personal: the wasted figure is himself.

The contrast between Harada’s first assessment and the second view gives the Mirror its decisive force. He had taken a ruddy complexion for evidence of strength; the reflection, reached only when Kei has physically helped him hold himself upright, shows an emaciated body he could not or would not recognize. Even his attempt to cry out produces only a weak sound, scarcely more than a sigh. His body and voice confirm the frailty that his earlier confidence had denied.

The scene does not offer a clinical explanation for the sudden exhaustion. Instead, it binds the collapse to the story’s recurring tension between Harada’s comforting contact with the dead and the deterioration he resists seeing. His visions have seemed to restore warmth and strength, yet the Mirror discloses a severe cost in his living body. Kei’s alarm makes that cost visible to another person before Harada can admit it to himself.

Loss, Keepsakes, and Continuing Remembrance

The parents’ later disappearance gives the Mirror encounter a further consequence. During a subsequent visit, Harada can see through his mother’s shoulders; his father’s shoulders and torso also begin to fade. He understands that this is how his parents will leave him and sits stunned, unable to stop it. As they vanish, he thanks them quietly and keeps watching until his mother is almost invisible. Their fading turns the earlier question of whether he can sustain their imagined life into an actual farewell.

Afterward, despite his fatigue, Harada searches for something material to carry away. He gathers the two pairs of chopsticks his parents used and carefully wraps them in a handkerchief, making the effort to preserve objects from the meal when the people who shared it are gone. The chopsticks give his attachment a physical form: unlike the image in the Mirror, they can be carried beyond the encounter.

Much later, Harada brings incense, an incense burner, and chrysanthemums to his parents’ family grave in Aichi, which he has not visited for two years. He prays there with Mamiya and thinks of returning with the chopsticks from his parents’ last meal, which he plans to burn as an offering. The thought gives him a reason to come back. The movement from imagined reunion to fading figures and finally to grave-side ritual does not erase his bond with his parents; it changes how he can continue it. The Mirror scene is pivotal because it exposes the bodily danger of trying to keep the dead present while foreshadowing the harder, material acts of farewell and remembrance that follow.