Tawara-machi Station links Hideo Harada’s childhood in Asakusa to his adult returns to a neighborhood he has kept at a distance. The station is more than a transit stop in his recollections: its name carries an old attachment to home, while the streets around it lead toward places whose emotional force he fears and whose physical remains are eventually found altered or gone.

Place in Harada’s Early Life

Harada was born in Asakusa in 1939, the first child of a sushi chef and a kitchen helper who worked at the same restaurant. His family lived in an apartment close to Tawara-machi Station. His father served twice in the army; near the end of the war, while his father was away, Harada and his mother stayed with his maternal grandparents in Tochigi. After his father returned from the Philippines in 1946, the family went back to Asakusa and sold whatever food they could obtain as “Vitamin Stew.” Harada remembered helping his mother thicken it with flour and water in a bowl before she stirred it into a large, bubbling pot.

Around the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, his father found regular work again as a sushi chef in Nihonbashi. The family nevertheless stayed in Asakusa, renting an apartment on the second floor of a tinsmith’s house behind Honganji Temple. There Harada’s mother became pregnant with a second child, though he never learned whether the baby would have been a brother or a sister. The station’s association with home thus belongs to a childhood shaped by postwar displacement, precarious work, and a family life he later struggles to revisit.

A Name and a Route Back

After many years away, Harada returned to Asakusa, but initially avoided the streets most closely tied to his childhood. He could walk through the busy area around Kaminarimon Gate and Sensō-ji, yet he had never turned toward the International Theater, Honganji Temple, or Tawara-machi Station on his earlier visits. He knew the city had changed, but the possibility that familiar places might still survive frightened him: encountering the tinsmith’s house where he had lived with his parents could release grief he had kept contained since their deaths when he was twelve.

On a later visit, Harada got off the subway at Tawara-machi Station rather than continuing to the end of the line at Asakusa. His attention to the station’s name reveals how strongly he still identifies with the district. He recalled once hearing a television news anchor pronounce it as Tawara-cho and reacting as if the mistake had slighted his hometown, despite his infrequent visits. That old loyalty persists even as he approaches the neighborhood with doubts and finds its shabby streets under the midsummer sun.

Fear, Return, and the Changed Neighborhood

The return is not emotionally straightforward. As Harada hurries toward Tawara-machi Station, he anxiously looks over his shoulder, afraid that his mother might be following him; to his relief, she is not there. The station marks an exit from an encounter with the past that has become frighteningly immediate, as well as a practical route away from streets where memory seems capable of overwhelming him.

Later, Harada and Mamiya go to the alley where the old apartment building had stood. The building and its metal staircase have disappeared, leaving an empty lot bounded by the walls of neighboring structures. Weeds cover the small patch of ground, making it seem strangely out of place amid the surrounding buildings. The lot is the material counterpart to Harada’s uncertain recollections: a place that once held his family’s home now offers no intact structure to confirm or restore it. The area’s further redevelopment is already anticipated, as surrounding buildings are due to be removed for a new construction project.

Memory Preserved Beyond the Site

At the empty lot, Harada and Mamiya pray with incense. Harada brings a small bouquet of chrysanthemums and incense and a burner; it has been two years since he last visited the family grave in Aichi, where his parents’ ashes are buried. He then thinks of returning with the chopsticks his parents used at their last meal, intending to burn them in another act of remembrance. The gesture gives him a reason to come back, even as the former home itself has vanished.

Tawara-machi Station’s significance therefore lies in its relation to places that are remembered, revisited, and transformed rather than in any described feature of the station building itself. Its name preserves Harada’s attachment to his hometown; its streets bring him toward the grief he has avoided; and the disappearance of the nearby family home shows how urban change can remove the physical setting on which private memory once depended. Objects carried from elsewhere—incense, flowers, and the remembered chopsticks—become means of continuing that connection when the neighborhood can no longer return the family home to him.