Hideo Harada’s first meeting with the couple who resemble his deceased parents begins as a return to a place he has spent years avoiding. In Asakusa, a stranger’s likeness to Hideo’s father and a woman’s voice like his mother’s turn a guarded visit into an intimate, ambiguous reunion. The encounter gives shape to Hideo’s longing for parental welcome, while leaving open whether the couple belong to the external world or to an illusion made possible by grief.

Return to a feared childhood landscape

After his parents died when he was twelve, Hideo allowed himself few tears. He had revisited Asakusa, but kept away from the streets most closely tied to his childhood. He could pass through the area around Kaminarimon Gate, visit Sensō-ji and the entertainment district to its west, yet avoided the International Theater and the neighborhoods around Honganji Temple and Tawara-machi Station. More than thirty years had passed, and he expected the city to have changed. Still, he dreaded finding the tinsmith’s shop where he and his parents had spent their final months together. The possibility that a familiar place might bring the sealed-up emotions of his childhood rushing back seemed more threatening than the neighborhood’s likely transformation.

That fear gives the encounter its emotional stakes. Hideo’s return is not simply a search for surviving landmarks: it takes him toward a past he has protected himself from feeling. The man’s resemblance therefore reaches him before any explanation can. During a performance, Hideo hears a voice and sees a bearing that recall his father. He wants to look directly at the man, partly to find a difference that will quiet his reaction. Instead, when he turns, the man’s profile appears almost exactly like his father’s at the time of his death. Hideo looks away, startled by the resemblance and unable to treat it as an ordinary coincidence.

Recognition and invitation

The man soon approaches Hideo in the aisle and invites him to leave with him. Hideo’s voice trembles as he tries to establish whether the invitation is really meant for him. The encounter shifts from watching a stranger at a distance to following him through the neighborhood. The man leads Hideo up a metal staircase on the side of a small, two-story apartment building, moving quietly along the second-floor walkway toward the apartment at the back. Hideo follows his careful steps, though the familiarity of the man’s appearance has not made the situation any less uncanny.

At the doorway, Hideo stops rather than entering. A woman briefly appears, smiles, and invites him inside. Her voice is his mother’s. Hideo recognizes her as his mother and is overcome by the force of the recognition; he cannot readily move or speak. The sequence makes the reunion intimate but also incomplete. As Hideo later understands it, he learned that the woman was his mother from words spoken to him, but they had not yet had a chance to speak as mother and son. The resemblance and voice establish the emotional bond for him without resolving what the couple are or how they came to occupy this apartment.

When Hideo leaves, he experiences the separation as a child taking leave of his parents before going to Tokyo. He does not want to say goodbye, and watches the couple recede through tears. Asked by the cab driver, he explains their connection indirectly, calling them relatives he has not seen for a long time. That modest account contrasts with the intensity of the farewell: the people he has just met feel to him less like strangers than parents from whom he has been separated since childhood.

An imagined reunion and its return

Hideo later considers the possibility that the Asakusa experiences have been hallucinations. He does not dismiss them as meaningless. They occur in Asakusa rather than intruding on his life at home or work, and he finds them warm and strengthening. The couple’s apparent ages sharpen the impossibility and the appeal: they seem to be in their thirties, while Hideo is forty-eight. He nevertheless feels ready to accept an imagined world in which they can be his parents again.

The reunion also exposes the part of Hideo that remains a child seeking his parents’ welcome. He imagines that, between his visits, the couple might be frozen in the middle of their activities, as if they existed only when he returned to them. In that conception, his visits do more than recover a memory: they seem to give the imagined parents life. Hideo fears that suppressing this enduring child in himself could also extinguish the parents who have returned in his imagination. His willingness to continue visiting is therefore bound to both comfort and responsibility, even as he recognizes the experience may have no basis beyond his own mind.

On a later visit, Hideo gets off at Tawara-machi Station rather than continuing to Asakusa. The midsummer sun and the shabby townscape do not restore the ease of the first encounter; doubt weighs on him as he makes his way toward the couple. This change in mood shows that the return is not a simple repetition of the first meeting. The place still draws him, but the possibility that he is sustaining an illusion now accompanies the comfort he hopes to find there.

Farewell and what remains

At a later meeting, Hideo sees his mother’s shoulders become transparent and his father begin to fade. He understands that they are leaving and cannot stop the disappearance. Rather than look away, he stays with them and thanks them before they vanish. The farewell converts the earlier wish for renewed family life into an acknowledgment that the reunion cannot last. Afterward, exhausted and distressed, he gathers the two pairs of chopsticks his parents used and carefully wraps them in a handkerchief. The chopsticks become a material trace of a meal and of a relationship that cannot be kept present in the same way as before.

The apartment’s disappearance later gives the encounter a parallel, physical ending. When Hideo returns with Mamiya, the building has been torn down and the site is an empty lot bounded by neighboring walls, with summer weeds growing through it. The absence of the apartment makes the former meeting place inaccessible, much as the parents’ fading made the reunion temporary. Hideo brings incense, a burner, and chrysanthemums; he and Mamiya pray at the site. He remembers that his parents’ ashes are buried in Aichi and that he has not visited their family grave for two years. He also plans to bring and burn the chopsticks from their last meal on a future visit. The first encounter thus remains connected not only to an uncertain vision, but to acts of remembrance that continue after the couple and their apartment are gone.