Kei’s demand that the narrator never return to Asakusa

Kei’s demand that Hideo Harada never return to Asakusa makes his visits to his deceased parents a direct test of his loyalty to the living and the dead. Her prohibition rests on a visible danger: she believes contact with the dead is wasting Hideo’s body. But Hideo cannot accept that protecting himself requires abandoning parents who are waiting for him, and his eventual return turns the promise into a painful conflict rather than a settled rule.

The prohibition and its grounds

The demand follows Hideo’s account to Kei of what has happened in Asakusa. The next day, he feels again as if he is sneaking behind someone’s back, even before he has made the trip. Kei had insisted, “Promise me,” and made the condition absolute: “Promise me you won’t ever go there again.” She pleads at length, while Hideo cannot find a sensible response. Her insistence is not simply a request for reassurance; it names a boundary meant to stop his visits altogether.

Hideo understands the principle behind Kei’s fear. His parents may have no malicious or mischievous intentions, but they have passed into the world of the dead, and he shares Kei’s conviction that the dead’s return disrupts the order of the living. Contact with such beings, he agrees, is something to avoid. The difficulty is that this judgment does not translate into treating his own mother and father as an evil to resist. The general rule seems sound to him, yet his attachment to the particular dead makes obedience almost impossible.

Kei gives the prohibition an urgent bodily basis. She points to Hideo’s wasting appearance, saying, “your body is wasting away” and that he looks shocking, with hollow eyes. Hideo checks the mirror but still cannot see the emaciation she describes. He remembers her repeated insistence that he is “nothing but skin and bones,” and recognizes that people may fail to perceive their own decline even when it is plain to others. Yet the mirror does not persuade him: he is unwilling to accept its implied warning. The disagreement therefore concerns both the danger itself and Hideo’s ability to recognize it.

The promise against the farewell

Hideo’s resistance is sharpened by what he has already said to his parents as they parted. He had promised to return soon, with emphatic assurances that he would. He imagines them waiting expectantly at their home in Asakusa because, after his promise, they would not think to visit his apartment instead. Simply disappearing would leave them without an explanation. In his view, stopping for the sake of self-preservation without saying goodbye would amount to coldly abandoning them and acting with gross selfishness.

His reasoning is not confidence that his life matters little. Rather, he no longer knows how much weight to give competing forms of love. His relationship with Kei might be reason enough to protect himself, but he doubts how much stock he can place in romantic love. His faith in parental love is also tenuous; nevertheless, he imagines that his parents, in their present form, have come into the world solely for his sake. He further fears that their existence may be precarious, vanishing if his heart ceases to turn toward them. Against that imagined fragility, a farewell becomes urgent: he wants at least to say goodbye, even if he cannot make himself end the visits.

Breaking the prohibition

As evening approaches, Hideo breaks his promise. He has spent most of the afternoon outlining the plot for the second episode of a series. Before leaving, he calls Kei’s apartment to check that she is not home, then prepares to go out. The precautions expose how fully he knows he is crossing a boundary: he feels watched, tries to shake off that sensation in the hallway, and says aloud that he is looking for something good to eat. He believes Kei is at work in Tsukiji, at a computer in the accounting department of the packinghouse, but still feels uneasy as he watches the elevator open and conceals himself from her window after leaving the building.

The effort required to leave surprises him. On the cab ride to Asakusa, he recalls the eyes Kei fixed on him while extracting the promise, along with the remembered whiteness of her body. The recollection binds the prohibition to their intimacy as well as to her warning: he is not escaping Kei’s concern without feeling its hold. His return is thus neither a careless dismissal of her nor a clean choice of his parents over her. It is a deliberate evasion undertaken while he remains conscious of the promise and of the relationship it expresses.

Confession and unresolved boundary

Kei later raises the broken promise while Hideo is standing on a chair adjusting the air-conditioner slats. She comes up to him and wraps her arms around his waist, then asks why he had to go and why he had to break his promise. Hideo considers what to say but knows lying will do no good. He explains that he wanted to tell his parents goodbye and did not want to stop appearing without warning. His explanation gives the trip a specific purpose, but it does not resolve the more difficult question of whether he actually ended his visits.

Kei presses him to answer whether he said goodbye; when he evades, he remarks that she is starting to sound like his mother. She immediately rejects the evasion and asks whether he told his parents he could not come anymore. Hideo answers that he could not. Kei says she had expected as much. The exchange reveals the limit of the farewell he sought: he did go to Asakusa, but he could not deliver the words that would make the separation final. Her demand remains unfulfilled, while Hideo’s promise to his parents continues to bind him. The rule’s force lies in that unresolved collision: Kei sees continued contact as a threat to his life, whereas Hideo experiences withdrawal without explanation as a betrayal of the people he longs to see.