Hideo’s parents’ former apartment in Asakusa is the place where Hideo Harada’s childhood memories of family life meet the adult’s longing to recover them. It is not only a remembered home: Hideo returns to the neighborhood, experiences his parents’ apparent welcome there, and eventually learns that the apartment building has been demolished. Its disappearance makes the location’s importance newly visible. When the rooms can no longer hold his memories, an empty lot, two cinder blocks, incense, and saved chopsticks become the fragile means by which he keeps his parents close.

Location and remembered geography

The former home belongs to a part of Asakusa that Hideo had avoided on earlier visits. He could go to Sensō-ji and the entertainment district to its west, but he did not turn toward the International Theater, the streets around Honganji Temple, or Tawara-machi Station, places more intimately bound to his childhood. More than thirty years had passed, and he expected the city to have changed; the prospect that some familiar place might nevertheless survive was itself difficult to face. The location therefore exists in two registers: as part of a modern urban district and as a remembered landscape whose significance cannot be measured by its present appearance.

His hesitation is bound to the home’s association with the last days and months he spent with his parents at the tinsmith’s place. Hideo fears that encountering a surviving trace of that time could break through the emotional restraint he has maintained since their deaths, when he was twelve. He imagines himself stripped of his defenses and overwhelmed by tears. The old neighborhood is not a neutral backdrop for recollection: walking toward it risks making a private past suddenly immediate.

When Hideo finally returns to the district, he gets off at Tawara-machi Station rather than continuing to Asakusa. He remembers having angrily corrected a television news anchor who misread the station name, taking the mistake as a slight against his hometown. Although he had seldom returned, that small act of loyalty remained. The detail links the location to an identity that has endured even during years of distance: the old district is still his in memory, though he has not kept it present in everyday life.

A home re-entered through memory

The apartment’s importance is inseparable from Hideo’s encounters with the parents he lost as a child. In the imagined or possibly hallucinatory world he experiences in Asakusa, their younger selves welcome him into a family relation that ordinary time cannot permit: they are in their thirties, while he is forty-eight. Hideo acknowledges that what happens there may exist only in his mind, but he finds comfort and strength in these encounters and chooses not to reject them simply because they may be unreal.

At first, the mother’s recognition reaches him indirectly: he has learned from words spoken behind him that the woman is his mother, but they have not yet had the chance to speak as parent and child. This belated recognition makes the place feel less like a stable reconstruction of the past than a threshold where the family relation can briefly begin again. In Hideo’s understanding, his parents appear to have their own work and play between visits, yet he also fears that without him they may be suspended, like figures in a wax museum. He wonders whether he alone gives life to their return. The apartment thus becomes the imagined setting for a reunion, but also the point at which that reunion depends on his own need and presence.

The visits acquire the texture of ordinary domestic life. On one occasion, Hideo arrives two days in a row and brings half a watermelon, choosing a manageable amount for the household. His father greets him cheerfully from the kitchen sink, where he is wiping himself down with a cool washcloth after pulling his arms from his yukata sleeves. His mother is reorganizing the futon closet and teases him about neglecting his work like his father. When they learn that the watermelon is already chilled, his father is eager to eat it; his mother remarks on the heat, and his father tells Hideo to take off his shirt and make himself comfortable. These familiar gestures give the remembered home its force: not grandeur or spectacle, but the easy, affectionate routines of being expected and welcomed.

The vanished building

The building’s eventual absence makes the boundary between remembered place and present-day city unavoidable. Mamiya explains that the site is an empty lot: the apartment building was torn down in May, and surrounding structures are also due to be removed for a new building. When Hideo and Mamiya approach from International Boulevard and turn onto a street of small shops, the neighborhood appears unchanged until they reach the alley. There, the metal staircase and apartment building that Hideo knew are gone.

What remains is a small, forlorn lot enclosed by the dingy walls of neighboring buildings. Weeds have grown through a summer in a place otherwise short of greenery, lending it an almost otherworldly appearance. The new growth is not a restoration of the old home; it is evidence of the interval since demolition, occupying ground where the remembered building once stood. Hideo’s account of the apartment’s former position supplies what the site itself can no longer show. The location persists as a relationship between present ground and a vanished structure, one that has to be reconstructed through memory and another person’s attention.

Mamiya has already tried to make that reconstruction tangible. He leads Hideo into the lot and stops at a place he has judged to lie beneath the apartment Hideo visited. There he has cleared the weeds and stood two found cinder blocks on end, like grave markers. The apartment had been on the second floor, so the blocks do not reproduce its rooms or height; they mark an approximate position, offering a modest point of orientation where the building has disappeared. Hideo recognizes that Mamiya has worked out the spot from his account. The gesture turns attentive listening into a physical memorial, without pretending that the original home can be recovered.

Memory after demolition

Hideo brings incense and a burner, along with chrysanthemums wrapped in newspaper. It has been two years since he last visited the family grave in Aichi, where his parents’ ashes are buried. At the lot, he lights incense, divides it between two holders, and prays; Mamiya joins him. The improvised observance connects the former apartment to the family grave, while distinguishing the remembered home from the place where his parents’ ashes rest. The lot is not their burial site, but it has become a place where their presence and Hideo’s history with them can be acknowledged.

Hideo also carries the two pairs of chopsticks his parents used at their last meal together. After their apparent farewell, he has gathered them with great effort, wrapped them carefully in a handkerchief, and kept them as something to remember his parents by. At the lot, he thinks that on his next visit he will bring the chopsticks, burn them, and pray again. Their passage from an intimate meal to a carefully preserved keepsake gives material form to a bond that the vanished apartment can no longer contain.

The location’s narrative significance rests in this movement from avoidance, to imagined domestic return, to physical absence and deliberate remembrance. The city’s redevelopment removes the building, while Hideo’s account, Mamiya’s markers, and the ritual with incense preserve distinct traces of what stood there and whom it held. His hope of returning with the chopsticks does not reverse the demolition or erase the boundary between past and present. It gives him a reason to revisit the site and to sustain a connection with his parents beyond the brief life of their apparent reunion.