Hideo Harada’s return to Asakusa after promising Kei never to go there again shows how strongly his longing for Hideo's mother and Hideo's father draws him across a boundary he believes should remain closed. The visit first restores an ordinary family closeness through games and affectionate banter; its later movement toward farewell makes that comfort inseparable from loss. Hideo breaks his promise not out of indifference to Kei, but because he cannot accept leaving his parents without saying goodbye.

The promise and the pull of Asakusa

The return follows Kei’s urgent demand that Hideo Harada promise never to go to Asakusa again. He recognizes the force of her objection: his parents have died, and he shares Kei’s conviction that contact with the dead disrupts the order of the living. But his attachment resists the general rule. He cannot regard Hideo's mother and Hideo's father as an evil to be fought, and the thought of abandoning them without a farewell feels to him like an act of selfishness. He wonders whether the small physical cost of returning is worth avoiding, especially when the relationship that might otherwise restrain him no longer seems certain enough to outweigh his bond with his parents.

Earlier visits have made that choice emotionally difficult. Hideo Harada has come to accept the possibility that his experiences in Asakusa are hallucinations, while finding comfort and strength in them. He imagines that his parents’ renewed existence may depend on his attention: when he is away, perhaps their time is an empty interval, and he alone can breathe life into them. This is his own conjecture, not a confirmed account of how the apparitions work, but it makes absence feel like abandonment. On the evening he decides to return, he finishes outlining a television episode, checks that Kei is away from her apartment, and leaves with an uneasy sense that she might somehow be watching him. His secret departure makes the promise a real conflict rather than a passing declaration.

Returning to the family home

At the familiar metal staircase, Hideo Harada hears Hideo's mother announce his arrival to Hideo's father. She reappears at the open doorway with a broad, welcoming smile, and he greets her as his mother. The welcome immediately restores a family role that is otherwise unavailable to him. His return does not begin with an explanation or a reckoning over the broken promise; it begins with recognition and the warmth of being received at home.

The surrounding visits carry the texture of ordinary family time. In August, with much of Tokyo away for the Obon Festival and shops shut until the seventeenth, Hideo's father finds two worn baseball gloves in the futon closet. The quiet holiday setting recalls Hideo Harada’s childhood wish to play catch with his father. His father had been absorbed in baseball with his sushi-shop companions and had often declined to play with his son; when he did agree, they used a rubber ball rather than the regulation baseball Hideo wanted. On the later outing, the closed shops and reduced traffic still do not make the shopping street empty enough for a game. Hideo's father briskly changes course, and Hideo follows, seeing him less as the formidable figure of childhood than as a cheerful, adaptable man who assumes things will work out and finds another way when they do not.

Back at the apartment, the family plays Nine’s High. Hideo's mother and Hideo's father are practiced players, quick with their cards, and their teasing gives the visit the ease of a household routine. What moves Hideo Harada is not a declaration of affection but their evident enjoyment of the time together and their good-natured exchanges. He has intended to tell them that this will be his last visit, yet cannot bring himself to interrupt that happiness. When they see him off on International Boulevard, they invite him to return and say they will be expecting him. The promise to Kei has already been broken; the farewell Hideo meant to give his parents remains unspoken.

A farewell he cannot undo

The later farewell visit brings the conflict into the open. As evening deepens, Hideo Harada walks with Hideo's mother and Hideo's father toward Kaminarimon Gate. They pass a shop where an attendant is grilling skewered eel livers, and Hideo's father stops to suggest they each have one. The ordinary pause only sharpens the knowledge that this is not an ordinary family outing. Hideo proposes going up to the temple to pray to the Goddess of Mercy and browse the shops, but Hideo's father says they are not free to do whatever they please. Hideo's mother agrees, crying. Her grief makes it difficult for Hideo to keep to his decision that he will not return.

During their last meal together, Hideo Harada protests that he is not the good man his parents seem to believe him to be. He calls himself a failed husband and an inadequate father, doubts the value of his career, and admits that his parents cannot know how he might have treated them had they lived. As he speaks, he sees through Hideo's mother's shoulders; Hideo's father is fading too. Their disappearance gives visible form to the departure they had tried to explain. Hideo cannot stop it, and he forces himself to watch, thanking them quietly and saying goodbye as Hideo's father's shoulders vanish and Hideo's mother's face dims.

The loss leaves him exhausted, but he does not leave empty-handed. He gathers the two pairs of chopsticks his parents used, wraps them carefully in a handkerchief, and struggles through the practical task of paying the bill. Two years later, at the family grave in Aichi, he brings incense, a burner, and chrysanthemums wrapped in newspaper. As he and Mamiya pray beside the ashes, Hideo Harada thinks of bringing the chopsticks from his parents’ last meal on a future visit and burning them in remembrance. The keepsake cannot restore the family scene, but it gives his relationship with his parents a form that can continue without another return to their apparition-filled home.

Significance of the return

The event turns on a painful contrast between two promises: Hideo Harada’s promise to Kei to stay away from Asakusa, and the implicit invitation from Hideo's mother and Hideo's father to come again. His inability to honor the first exposes how little abstract knowledge of death can settle a personal attachment. At the same time, the visits do not resolve into a simple triumph of reunion. The more vividly the parents resume ordinary life through cards, games, food, and welcome, the harder it becomes for Hideo to name an ending; when they fade, his remaining connection must shift from shared presence to memory and ritual. The chopsticks carry that change forward: an object from the final meal becomes a reason to return to the grave, not a means of bringing the dead back.