Hideo’s decline from contact with the dead

Hideo’s decline from contact with the dead is the bodily cost he comes to associate with his visits to Asakusa and his renewed relationship with his deceased parents. His strength can seem to return, and his hands can appear normal to him, even while Kei and other living observers recognize that his condition remains grave. This mismatch lets the visits feel sustaining even as they bring him closer to collapse, until he must choose between protecting his life and returning to the parents he longs to see.

Origin and Perceived Cause

Hideo’s connection to his parents takes shape in an experience he recognizes may be imaginary. He reflects that the events in Asakusa might have occurred entirely in his mind, yet their comfort and emotional force make him reluctant to reject them. The woman he encounters has been identified as his mother only through words spoken behind him; they have not yet had the chance to speak as mother and son. Even so, the possibility of a relationship with parents who appear to be in their thirties, while he is forty-eight, draws him toward this imagined world rather than away from it.

The pull is not simply a wish to recover a childhood he never had. Hideo recalls having known the happiness of loved ones welcoming him during his marriage and when his son was small. But the yearning for his parents’ joyful welcome remains powerful, and he understands it as something rooted in the child within himself. He also imagines that his parents’ existence in Asakusa may depend on his visits: between them, they seem to continue their own lives, yet he wonders whether time without him is a void and whether he alone can make them live again. This imagined responsibility gives the visits a consequence beyond his own comfort.

Hideo later interprets his weakening as the effect of contact between different worlds, not as deliberate harm by his parents. He tells Kei that he does not believe his parents intend to drain his strength and thinks they may not know he is dying. In his view, they cannot see him wasting away any more than he can see what is happening to them. That explanation preserves his affection for them, but it also leaves him with no safe way to continue the relationship: an innocent attachment can still exact a lethal cost.

Fluctuating Strength and Misrecognition

The decline is not experienced as a steady, unmistakable progression. At one point, after being unable to stand, Hideo feels strength flow back into his limbs over the course of about an hour. His hands, which had appeared severely altered when he last examined them, now look fleshy and normal to him. He can sit up and feels energetic enough to want to leap to his feet. Kei, however, remains horrified and confirms that he still looks as unwell as before. His physical sensation of recovery and the evidence visible to another person do not agree.

This temporary reprieve does not persuade Hideo that the danger has passed. He understands that the vigor he feels cannot be ordinary recovery if his visible condition remains so poor; he attributes it to a supernatural force associated with the world his parents inhabit. The return of energy therefore has a double meaning. It makes him feel restored, but also exposes how the connection can make him experience vitality without undoing his deterioration.

The discrepancy recurs when Hideo examines his hand and finds it apparently normal, then asks Mamiya whether it looks withered. Mamiya nods. Hideo wonders whether his parents are still present in the shadows, or whether the unknown power that enabled their return is continuing to give him an illusion of health while his strength is being depleted. He cannot establish what is sustaining that illusion, but the contrast between his own perception and Mamiya’s answer prevents him from treating the normal-looking hand as proof of recovery.

The Decision to Return

Once Hideo recognizes that the Asakusa visits may be killing him, he still resolves to go back. He tells Kei that he needs to visit Asakusa one more time. When she warns that the journey could kill him, he answers that he expects to die at this rate anyway. His decision is not presented as confidence that he can survive, but as a choice made under the belief that continuing as he is already carries the same danger.

He is also troubled by the possibility that abandoning his parents could leave them in limbo or prevent them from returning peacefully to the other side. He does not want their relationship to end through his simple disappearance, and calls them good people. Kei points out that they have been taking his lifeblood; Hideo answers by distinguishing harm from intention. His reasoning cannot protect him from the consequences he fears, but it shows why physical survival alone cannot settle the choice: he feels responsible for a relationship he believes may depend on his presence.

When he visits his parents, Hideo tells them what his producer and Mamiya have said about his health and describes what he saw in the mirror. He deliberately leaves Kei out of the account, fabricating part of his explanation because he fears that someone seen as separating him from his parents might face retaliation from unknown powers of the dead. He is not certain that silence will protect Kei, and there is no confirmation that such retaliation would occur. The omission nevertheless shows how his concern about the danger has widened beyond his own body, even as he continues to keep the visit and his bond with his parents.

Farewell and Continuing Effects

During the visit, Hideo protests that he is not the devoted, admirable son his parents believe him to be. He recalls his failures as a husband and father and doubts the value of his professional work. As he speaks, he sees through his mother’s shoulders; his father’s shoulders and torso also begin to fade. The change makes clear that the parents’ presence is ending, and Hideo cannot stop it. Their departure turns the cost of the visits into a final separation rather than a problem he can solve by finding a way to maintain both worlds.

Hideo thanks his parents quietly, conscious of the other people in the restaurant, and watches as they disappear. Afterward, despite his fatigue, he gathers the two pairs of chopsticks they used and wraps them carefully in a handkerchief. The objects become a physical reminder of the last shared meal, something he can carry away when he can no longer keep his parents present through another visit. His attempt to preserve them marks a shift from seeking their living company to holding on to a material trace of it.

The consequences continue after the farewell. Hideo spends twenty-two days at Tokyo National Hospital in Komazawa. Intravenous feeding helps him recover, but not completely: half his hair has turned gray, his eyesight has been damaged, and his clothes still fit loosely enough that he must tighten his belt by two notches shortly before discharge. He remains too frail to write for the television series, and the producer arranges for a younger writer to take over from the second episode. The decline therefore affects not only his private life but also his work, and medical care does not restore him to his former condition.

Later, at his parents’ family grave in Aichi, Hideo visits with Mamiya and brings incense, an incense burner, and chrysanthemums; it has been two years since his previous visit. He remembers the chopsticks from his parents’ last meal and plans to bring and burn them during a future visit. The gesture does not reverse his physical decline or recreate the Asakusa reunion. Instead, it gives his attachment another form: remembrance through an object and a repeated prayer, after direct contact with his parents has ended. The state’s central tension remains unresolved in simple terms—his longing brings comfort, but contact across the boundary of life and death has left him weakened, and farewell does not erase the bond that made him return.