Hideo’s recurring visions of his parents

Hideo’s recurring visions of his parents are a series of encounters in which people bearing the faces, voices, and familiar manner of his dead parents appear to welcome him back into their family. Set against Hideo’s long-avoided childhood neighborhood of Asakusa, the visions make his longing for parental affection feel briefly present and tangible, while the question of whether they are ghosts or hallucinations remains unsettled. Their return comforts him, but it also carries a cost: as the visits continue, Hideo believes contact with the dead is draining his strength, and his parents eventually vanish before him.

Origins in Asakusa

Hideo’s return to the neighborhood begins amid apprehension. After his parents died when he was twelve, he had allowed himself few tears and had kept away from streets most intimately tied to their last months together. On an evening visit to Asakusa, he walks past the shops near Sensō-ji but avoids the districts around the International Theater, Honganji Temple, and Tawara-machi Station. He fears that finding some remnant of his childhood might break the emotional restraint he has maintained for decades. The International Theater, he reminds himself, has long since been replaced by a modern hotel; the thought does not erase his fear of what memory might bring back.

That reluctance gives the visions a precise geography. The past does not return in an abstract dreamscape but in an old neighborhood whose streets Hideo knows have changed, even as they remain capable of summoning his childhood. When a performer’s voice and bearing recall Hideo’s father, he tries to turn away and reassure himself that the resemblance cannot be complete. Looking at the man’s profile, however, he sees a figure strikingly like his father at the time of his death. The encounter begins not with certainty but with an effort to explain away an unsettling resemblance.

Recognition and a Return to Family Life

The apparent reunion becomes more intimate when Hideo is invited into the apartment. A woman appears at the doorway, smiles, and calls him in; Hideo is so shaken that he wonders whether he is experiencing something impossible, though the scene feels vividly real to him. On a later visit, he gets off the subway at Tawara-machi Station rather than continuing to Asakusa. The midsummer sun and the shabby, discolored streets intensify his doubts as he makes his way to the couple’s apartment.

There, a woman kneeling at a low table recognizes him as her child. When Hideo asks her name, she answers that she is a Harada and laughs at the idea that a son would need to ask his own parents their surname. Her casual certainty delivers a shock: Hideo cannot easily preserve the distance between the living man he has become and the child she takes him to be. The exchange makes the visions more than visual likenesses. Within this apparent household, the parents accept him without hesitation, and Hideo is drawn into a relationship that his adult life cannot reproduce in quite the same form.

Hideo understands the contradiction. A mother and father in their thirties cannot literally be the parents who died thirty-six years earlier while their son is now forty-eight. He nevertheless imagines that his parents may exist anew in Asakusa, even in the intervals between his visits. The thought that they might be frozen in the middle of their activities when he is absent makes his own presence seem essential: perhaps he alone can breathe life into them. He also recognizes that the longing belongs to an enduring child within him. The visions give that child the joyful welcome he remembers wanting, and Hideo considers the comfort worth accepting even if the encounters are products of his mind.

Uncertainty and the Cost of Contact

Hideo never settles the visions’ reality. At one moment, he reasons that the parents with him must be inventions because his real parents, having died, cannot simply be brought back. At another, their unforced presence makes it difficult to believe that they exist only in his imagination. He tries to test the question through ordinary interaction: if his parents can teach him to play Flower Rummy, he thinks, he will know they exist independently of him. Yet the desire for proof coexists with his willingness to inhabit the imagined family life, rather than resolving its uncertainty.

The possibility that the visitors belong to the world of the dead changes the meaning of his physical decline. Hideo considers whether contact with the dead could sap a living person’s vital forces, drawing on accounts of such effects in legends and modern fiction. At first, he is almost willing to pay that price: if becoming paler would confirm that his parents are making sacrifices to return, the evidence might ease his mind. When he tells Kei about the experiences, he describes them as a blessing and as unreal but wonderful, insisting that his apparent haggardness does not make this particular experience a cause for worry. His explanation shows how comfort can make danger seem acceptable, even as his body becomes part of the question the visions raise.

Farewell and What Remains

In the final encounter, Hideo’s parents begin to disappear while he is with them. He can see through his mother’s shoulders; his father’s shoulders and torso also start to fade. As his mother’s face grows dim and his father’s shoulders vanish, Hideo understands that they are leaving and that he cannot stop it. He thanks them repeatedly and watches rather than looking away. Their disappearance transforms the visits from a possible continuing reunion into a farewell that Hideo can only witness.

Afterward, exhausted and distressed, he gathers the two pairs of chopsticks his parents used. He wraps them carefully in a handkerchief, treating the ordinary utensils as the keepsake he most urgently needs. Later, Hideo goes with Mamiya to the place where the apartment building stood. The building has been demolished, and the small lot is overgrown with weeds; the vanished home has no physical interior into which he can return. At the family grave in Aichi, where his parents’ ashes are buried, Hideo brings incense, a burner, and chrysanthemums, and prays beside Mamiya. He thinks of returning with the chopsticks to burn them and say another prayer. The objects thus carry a bond that the visions cannot preserve in their former form: Hideo’s parents are gone, but his remembrance of their shared life continues through deliberate acts of mourning.

Narrative Significance

The visions are structured around a sustained hesitation between psychological and supernatural explanations. Hideo himself calls the experiences possible hallucinations, yet their emotional and sensory force repeatedly unsettles that account. The text does not provide a final proof that the parents have returned from the dead; instead, it shows what Hideo’s need for them makes possible within his experience, and what that need appears to cost him. Asakusa’s changing streets and the later demolition of the apartment building place this uncertainty beside an indisputable loss: the childhood home is no longer there, and the parents cannot be recovered as they were.

The movement from welcome to disappearance also changes the form of Hideo’s connection with his parents. At first he longs to enter their home and be recognized as their son; eventually he watches them leave, preserves their used chopsticks, and joins a visit to their grave. The ending does not erase the comfort of the apparent reunions, nor does it treat remembrance as a substitute for physical return. Instead, the recurring visions lead Hideo from a fragile attempt to revive family life toward a continuing bond grounded in memory, prayer, and the material traces left by a last shared meal.