Hideo Harada’s reunion with the couple in Asakusa lets him inhabit, briefly, the ordinary family life that ended when he was a child. A remembered game of catch becomes a new one, a handshake tests the reality of touch, and a lesson in Hanafuda cards gives him a reason to sit beside his father. The intimacy is real to him even as he recognizes that the couple’s place in the present may belong to imagination; their fading turns that uncertainty into a farewell, and the chopsticks they leave behind become a way to carry the relationship forward.

Return to the childhood district

Before he can share this renewed family life, Hideo Harada must overcome his reluctance to revisit parts of Asakusa. He is willing to go to Sensō-ji and the nearby entertainment district, but avoids the places most closely tied to his childhood: the International Theater, the streets around Honganji Temple, and the area near Tawara-machi Station. He fears that finding the tinsmith’s place where he spent his final months with his parents might release grief he has kept contained since their deaths. The possibility of encountering a familiar street or building makes the journey emotionally perilous, even though he knows Tokyo has changed greatly.

On a later return, Hideo Harada gets off at Tawara-machi Station rather than riding to the end of the subway line at Asakusa. He remembers feeling protective of the district’s name when a television news anchor misread it, a small remnant of loyalty to the hometown he seldom visited. Now the midsummer sun and shabby townscape meet him as he sets out to see the couple again. His heavy steps register the doubts he carries into the visit: he wants the comfort of meeting them, but cannot settle what their presence means.

A son welcomed home

Hideo Harada has not yet spoken to the woman as his mother; he has learned who she is from words spoken behind him. The recognition makes him self-conscious as he approaches, aware that this will be their first conversation as parent and child. He has years of experience to tell them about, everything he has felt and endured since he was twelve. When his father calls his name from behind, he freezes before turning around. The familiar, informal greeting that follows eases the threshold between a remembered childhood and the present visit.

Inside, Hideo Harada recalls that he played catch with his father only once in the plaza in front of the International Theater. The scarcity of that memory gives the episode its particular weight: he had wished they could do it again, but they never had the chance. Now they toss a ball back and forth for nearly an hour, pausing for pedestrians and passing cars. Hideo Harada takes satisfaction in seeing that the cars are modern and that his father, too, has to step aside for them. The changed street and the father who moves through it with him belong to the present, even as each catch restores something of the lost relationship.

Testing what is real

The reunion does not resolve whether the couple are literally his parents returned or figures produced by his mind. Hideo Harada can see the contradiction: people in their thirties cannot ordinarily be parents to a forty-eight-year-old son, and his actual parents died decades earlier. Yet the couple before him do not seem false to him. He asks both parents to shake hands, then holds his father’s hand and feels it grip back. His mother’s hand is smaller and softer, rough in places. He concentrates on remembering the contact, treating the bodily sensation as evidence against the possibility that he is merely imagining them.

The same need to test the encounter shapes his wish to learn a game. Hideo Harada knows nothing about the game his parents propose; if his father teaches it and he can remember the rules after returning home, he reasons, that would show the man is not simply a product of his imagination. His father moves the table aside and, seated on the tatami, begins teaching him. The lesson gives father and son a practical task to share, while Hideo Harada’s private test reveals how urgently he wants the encounter to survive beyond the room.

He also understands the emotional dependence built into these visits. He wonders whether his parents’ renewed life in Asakusa exists only during the time he spends with them, and imagines them otherwise frozen in the middle of their activities. In this account, his own longing may be what gives the imagined parents motion and presence. That possibility does not make the comfort meaningless to him. He has known the joy of being welcomed by his wife and, when his son was a toddler, by his child; still, he recognizes that his desire for his parents’ smiles has a force those later experiences did not remove.

Farewell and what remains

At the eventual farewell, Hideo Harada protests that he is not the warm, devoted son his parents seem to believe in. He describes himself as a failed husband, an inadequate father, and a writer who has never produced anything truly great. As he speaks, his mother becomes transparent at the shoulders; his father’s shoulders and torso begin to fade as well. Hideo Harada understands that this is how they are leaving and cannot stop it. He keeps watching, thanks them repeatedly, and receives his mother’s goodbye as her face grows difficult to see.

After they disappear, he gathers the two pairs of chopsticks they used. Although exhaustion makes even ordinary tasks difficult, he wraps them carefully in a handkerchief, wanting a keepsake of the meal and of his parents’ presence. The chopsticks make the farewell tangible: the reunion cannot be held open, but an object used in their shared family life can be carried away. Later, when Hideo Harada visits the family grave in Aichi with Mamiya, he brings incense, a burner, and chrysanthemums. He remembers that it has been two years since his last visit and thinks of bringing his parents’ chopsticks to burn in a future prayer. The thought gives him an excuse to return to them through remembrance rather than another attempt to prolong the visit.

The altered site of memory

The Asakusa setting is more than a backdrop for the reunion. Hideo Harada’s childhood memories attach to particular streets and places, but he knows that the city has changed, and fears finding the sites that might bring his grief back with force. Eventually, Mamiya reports that the apartment building where the couple lived has been demolished and that the site is an empty lot. When they go there together, the alley still resembles the one Hideo Harada remembers until the building itself comes into view as an absence. The small lot, enclosed by neighboring walls and overgrown with summer weeds, seems set apart from the surrounding district.

That disappearance parallels, without explaining, the couple’s uncertain status: both the building and the parents’ presence are no longer available to him in the form he once encountered. The later visit to the grave and the saved chopsticks do not restore the lost home. They provide other, limited ways to maintain a bond with his parents. The episode thus moves from the hope of repeating family life to the recognition that reunion cannot be permanent, while leaving Hideo Harada with memories and objects through which affection can continue.