International Boulevard is a major thoroughfare in Asakusa that serves as both a practical route through the district and a recurring threshold in Hideo Harada’s return to places shaped by childhood memory. Though still busy in the city’s geography, it appears quieter and changed to him; from it, he makes his way toward encounters, departures, and the vanished site of his parents’ former apartment.

Setting and the remembered district

Hideo’s visits to Asakusa are shadowed by the difference between the city he remembers and the one that remains. He can visit Sensō-ji and the entertainment district to its west, but hesitates to revisit areas more intimately tied to his childhood, including the neighborhoods around the International Theater, Honganji Temple, and Tawara-machi Station. He fears that a surviving trace of the streets where he lived with his parents might release grief he has kept contained since their deaths. The boulevard belongs to the contemporary city he moves through, while the nearby streets hold the possibility of confronting what has been lost.

At dusk, Hideo and a man he has just met head toward International Boulevard. The man remarks that Asakusa now closes early and offers little to do after ten. At the crossing, the boulevard remains a major thoroughfare, but it seems narrower than Hideo remembers, and traffic is light. Its familiar urban function persists even as his sense of the district registers change and diminished activity.

Encounters and departures

International Boulevard recurs as a point of departure. A little after eleven, after spending time with the couple who resemble his late parents, Hideo takes a cab from the boulevard. The couple see him to the curb and urge him to come back, turning an ordinary ride away into another invitation to continue the relationship he has found in Asakusa.

On a later visit, he again leaves by way of the boulevard after sharing time with them. Their good-natured enjoyment of his company makes him unable to tell them that this will be his last visit. At the curb they send him off with the same cheerful expectation that he will return. The repeated departure therefore carries a conflict: Hideo intends to end the visits, but the warmth of the people waiting for him makes that decision difficult to voice.

The boulevard and the vanished apartment

When Hideo and Mamiya return to investigate the site of the apartment building, they begin from International Boulevard and turn onto a street lined with small shops. The surrounding route looks as it did on Hideo’s previous visits, but the alley reveals that the building and its metal staircase are gone. The site is an empty lot, bounded by dingy neighboring walls and overgrown with weeds after a summer without maintenance. Its unexpected greenery makes the place seem almost otherworldly against the built-up surroundings.

The change is concrete: the apartment building was demolished in May, and further structures around it are slated for removal to make way for a new building. Hideo experiences the lot as more than an absence of architecture; the news leaves him feeling alone, as if falling voicelessly into an abyss. At the site, he and Mamiya offer incense and chrysanthemums in prayer. Hideo remembers that it has been two years since he visited his parents’ grave in Aichi, and resolves to bring the chopsticks his parents used at their last meal on another visit.

Narrative significance

The boulevard links movement through present-day Asakusa with attempts to recover a personal past that the city cannot reliably preserve. Repeatedly, it is where Hideo leaves the couple who welcome him; later, it is the route from which he turns toward the empty lot where their former apartment stood. The changed street and the cleared building make memory’s instability visible: familiar approaches can remain while the place they lead to has disappeared. Yet Hideo’s plan to return with the chopsticks gives the site a continuing ritual purpose, even after the building itself is gone.