Hideo revisits Asakusa by day and is recognized by his parents

Hideo revisits Asakusa by day to test the reality of his encounter with the couple, but daylight brings no reassuring distance: a woman who looks and sounds like Hideo's mother recognizes him as her child. Her casual certainty turns his attempt to distinguish perception from reality into a direct confrontation with the possibility that the couple regard him as their son.

Purpose of the Return

After spending two days working on a proposal, Hideo sets out for Asakusa on the third day, shortly after noon. His decision follows a recent shift in his relationship with Kei. Their interlude has quieted the earlier impulse to rush back to Asakusa, just as the night he spent there had previously pushed his concerns about Kei's state of mind aside. Neither experience, however, has erased the other.

What remains is the couple's tenderness and their invitation to return: “Don’t be a stranger, now,” and “Yes, do come again.” Hideo no longer craves the same emotional comfort he found in their company, but he cannot simply put the encounter behind him. He knows that nighttime can distort perception and wants to find out how much of what happened might have been produced by the late hour. The midday visit is therefore a test: he seeks to look at the experience in the full light of day, not merely to repeat the comfort of the earlier visit.

The test carries a double expectation. On the way there, Hideo entertains the possibility—part fear, part hope—that the apartment may have disappeared or become impossible to find. Yet the second-floor walkway appears as real as before, and the couple's apartment is still there. The ordinary, visible persistence of the place answers one question without settling the larger one: the setting has not vanished, but its familiarity remains unsettling.

The Open Door and Recognition

A blue plastic garbage pail rests against the open door. Hideo reasons that it is there to keep the door from swinging shut, perhaps allowing a cross breeze; it has not been placed to welcome an expected visitor. This small domestic detail makes the apartment seem occupied on its own terms, not arranged for his return. At the same time, the open doorway makes the threshold unusually exposed: Hideo can see into the home before he has been invited inside.

He tries to quiet his steps, but knows his shoes on the metal stairs must have carried through the building. A long pause at the top might attract the residents' attention, so he strides along the walkway and knocks at the last apartment. When he calls out and looks inside, the familiar room contains a woman kneeling at a low table on the tatami, turning a crank attached to a plastic container. Her mundane activity belongs to the same ordinary domestic world that Hideo has come to verify.

The woman answers, “Oh, you came.” Hideo recognizes her as his mother—or, more cautiously, as a woman who looks in every discernible way like his mother when she was young. The distinction preserves the uncertainty he came to examine, while the woman's unhesitating welcome makes the resemblance difficult to keep at a safe distance. The daylight has not made her appearance less convincing, and she behaves as though his arrival is understandable rather than strange.

A Name That Makes Him a Child

As Hideo prepares to leave, the woman mentions that a typhoon had been forecast but now seems to have fizzled out. She speaks to his back while he puts on his shoes, and her voice, too, is indistinguishable from his mother's. The visit has already reproduced the resemblance in appearance; this final exchange makes it audible as well. Hideo then asks what he has not asked before: the residents' name, since no nameplate is displayed by the door.

The woman responds with easy certainty: “My word! What’re you talking about? It’s Harada, of course.” She says Hideo's surname without self-consciousness, laughs, and asks what child would ask his own parents their name. In that answer, recognition becomes explicit. She does not merely resemble Hideo's mother or offer familiar hospitality; she places him within the family, treating the shared surname and parent-child relationship as facts too obvious to require explanation.

Hideo feels the impact as if a sledgehammer were poised over him and then struck. He manages to laugh and blame the heat, but cannot turn to face her. His effort to verify the encounter has thus produced neither a simple debunking nor a settled explanation. Instead, the daytime visit brings the familial implication into words, and Hideo's strained reply conceals how completely that implication has overwhelmed him.

Flight and Unresolved Fear

Hideo tries to maintain an ordinary gait as he leaves, but terror rises rapidly. His feet speed up on the metal staircase, and by the time he reaches the shopping street through the alley he is running. The bodily escalation marks the visit's decisive reversal: he came seeking the clarity of daylight, yet the woman's recognition makes him less able to remain composed than during the approach.

He silently calls on God despite not being religious. When a cab arrives, he waves it away; the thought of being enclosed with the driver is frightening because the driver might turn and have Hideo's father's face. This is a feared possibility, not a second encounter: Hideo's father's appearance remains in his imagination, extending the scene's familial dread beyond the apartment. He scolds himself for watching too many old horror films, then realizes that he has spoken aloud and that people are looking at him strangely.

Hideo hurries toward Tawara-machi Station, glancing anxiously over his shoulder in case his mother is following. She is not. That absence offers immediate relief but no answer about the woman he has just left. The visit confirms that, in daylight, the apartment remains findable and the woman continues to resemble and speak like Hideo's mother; it also reveals her unprompted certainty that he is her child. Rather than dissolving the uncanny encounter, the return makes its emotional and familial force impossible for Hideo to dismiss.