Hideo Harada’s father-son relationship with his father

Hideo Harada’s father-son relationship is shaped by a childhood bond ended abruptly by death and, decades later, by Hideo’s return to Asakusa, where a man resembling his father seems to welcome him back as a son. The reunion cannot restore the lost years or settle whether the father is truly present, but it gives Hideo a chance to inhabit the family life he remembers and to speak about the childhood hopes that ended with his parents’ deaths. Its final movement is away from reunion and toward remembrance: Hideo watches his father disappear, then keeps the chopsticks used at their last meal as a material link to him.

Family Life in Asakusa

Hideo was born in Asakusa in 1939, the first child of a sushi chef and a kitchen helper who worked at the same restaurant. His father served twice in the army, including a period away during the war. While his father was absent near the war’s end, Hideo and his mother stayed with her parents in Tochigi. When his father returned from the Philippines in 1946, the family went back to Asakusa and made a living by selling whatever food they could assemble in the black market as Vitamin Stew. Still a grade-school child, Hideo helped his parents; one of his enduring memories is his mother stirring flour and water into a large pot while steam rose around her face. His father’s return meant that the household was again together, but the family’s life remained marked by the practical demands of postwar survival.

Around the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, Hideo’s father found regular work again as a sushi chef at a shop in Nihonbashi. The family continued to rent in Asakusa because both parents liked living there. Their apartment was on the second floor of a tinsmith’s house behind Honganji Temple, a home that later became inseparable from Hideo’s memories of his parents. His mother became pregnant there with a second child, but Hideo never learned whether the baby would have been a boy or a girl. The family’s ordinary future was thus present but unfinished even before the accident.

Death and the Interrupted Bond

In January of the following year, Hideo’s father was riding with Hideo’s mother on the back of his bicycle when a car struck them in front of the International Theater. Both died at the scene, and the vehicle was never found. Hideo heard that they had been hit by a black sedan; an uncle later speculated that the car might have been a jeep belonging to the American Occupation, but the uncertainty was never resolved. The abruptness of the deaths matters to the relationship: Hideo lost both parents at twelve, before adulthood could bring a different kind of conversation with his father or allow the family to resume the life interrupted by war, work, and precarious circumstances.

Afterward, Hideo went to live with his widowed grandfather in a farming village in Aichi, near Nagoya, where his father had grown up. Hideo tried to become a regular country boy, believing he needed to erase the signs of his city upbringing to get through junior high safely. That move made the separation from his father more than an emotional loss: it carried Hideo away from the Asakusa streets and home that held their shared history. As an adult, he had visited Asakusa but avoided the districts most closely tied to his childhood, including the area around the International Theater, Honganji Temple, and Tawara-machi Station. He feared that finding the old tinsmith’s building might release grief he had kept contained for years.

The Return to Asakusa

When Hideo eventually returns to the neighborhood, the encounter with a man whose voice and profile recall his father begins with hesitation. He changes seats to see the man more clearly, then recognizes a profile strikingly like his father’s at the time of his death. The resemblance is especially unsettling because the man appears to be in his thirties, whereas Hideo’s father died at thirty-nine and would, if alive, have been seventy-five. The gap between the remembered father and the apparently young stranger makes the encounter impossible to explain as a simple reunion with the man Hideo lost.

The man leads Hideo up a metal staircase to an apartment in a small two-story building. On another visit, Hideo gets off at Tawara-machi Station rather than continuing to Asakusa’s terminus. The route brings him into his old district, where he recalls how fiercely he once corrected a television news anchor for misreading the station’s name. His lingering loyalty to the place accompanies a new willingness to return to the couple who seem to have restored his parents to him. Yet the relationship remains framed by uncertainty: Hideo considers that the meetings may be hallucinations, while also finding comfort in them and resisting the idea that he must reject an experience that gives him warmth and strength.

A Son Given Another Chance

At first, Hideo has learned that the woman is his mother only from words spoken behind him; he and she have not yet had the chance to speak as parent and child. The arrival of his father’s familiar voice calling him by name changes that distance. Hideo freezes before turning around, overwhelmed by the prospect of meeting and speaking with them as his parents. He has years of experience to tell them about, but the reunion also returns him to a more specific childhood memory: once, he and his father played catch in the plaza in front of the International Theater. Hideo remembers doing it only once and wishing they could do it again, a small missed possibility that has endured because there was no second chance before his father died.

Hideo tries to make the renewed relationship tangible. He asks his father and mother to shake hands, then proposes learning hanafuda, a game he does not know. He reasons that if his father can teach him and he can remember how to play after returning home, the knowledge might demonstrate that the encounter is not merely a product of his imagination. The test joins affection to doubt: Hideo wants to accept his father’s presence, yet searches for something he can carry away that might confirm it. His father’s teasing response to a grown son who does not know the game gives their exchange the texture of ordinary family life, a casual familiarity that the lost years had denied them.

Hideo’s need for that family life deepens into a fear that his own return sustains his parents. He imagines them occupied with work and play between his visits, but also wonders whether those intervals are empty, leaving them frozen like figures in a wax museum. In that account, he alone can breathe life into them. The idea reveals the emotional stakes of his visits without resolving whether the parents are supernatural presences or hallucinations: the relationship feels real to Hideo, and his willingness to return is bound up with the belief that his parents are there for him.

Fading, Farewell, and Remembrance

During a later meal, Hideo turns against himself, describing himself as a failed husband and inadequate father and doubting the worth of his career. As he speaks, he sees through his mother’s shoulders; his father’s shoulders and torso begin to fade as well. The vanishing interrupts Hideo’s self-denunciation with a loss he cannot argue against or prevent. His father’s shoulders disappear, his mother’s face grows dim, and Hideo stays fixed on them rather than looking away. He thanks them repeatedly, keeping his voice hushed so as not to draw the attention of the waitress or other diners, while his mother says goodbye and becomes almost impossible to see.

After they are gone, Hideo is too distressed to explain what has happened to the waitress. He gathers the two pairs of chopsticks his parents used, works through his fatigue to wrap them carefully in a handkerchief, and carries them away. The chopsticks turn a fleeting reunion into something he can physically preserve. Later, when Hideo and Mamiya find that the apartment building has been demolished and its former site is an empty, weed-covered lot, the vanished home makes the loss of place visible as well as personal. Hideo brings incense, an incense burner, and chrysanthemums to the lot; it has been two years since he last visited the family grave in Aichi, where his parents’ ashes are buried. He and Mamiya pray together, and Hideo plans to return with the chopsticks from his parents’ last meal. The relationship therefore ends neither in restored family life nor in complete severance: his father is gone, but the remembered game, the unfinished conversations, the grave ritual, and the saved chopsticks give Hideo ways to continue addressing him as a son.