The deceased parents’ brief return to the living world

The deceased parents’ brief return to the living world is the uncertain reunion at the heart of Hideo Harada’s visits to Asakusa. His parents appear as younger adults, receive him as their son, and share ordinary family time with him, although Hideo recognizes that a couple in their thirties cannot literally be the parents of a forty-eight-year-old man. He considers the encounters possibly imaginary, yet accepts the comfort they give him. Their return is temporary: when he tries to arrange one last outing, they cannot go where they please, and at a farewell meal they gradually vanish, leaving their belongings behind. The relationship continues afterward through the chopsticks Hideo saves and the prayers he makes at their grave.

The return and its uncertain reality

Hideo’s first response to revisiting Asakusa is apprehension. The neighborhood is closely bound to childhood memories of the months he spent there with his parents, who died when he was twelve. He fears that finding familiar places still standing could release grief he has long kept contained. His hesitation is not simply about whether the streets have changed: the childhood places carry the possibility of an emotional reunion with a past he has tried not to approach.

After the encounters begin, Hideo weighs their reality rather than settling the question. He acknowledges that what happened in Asakusa was not normal and may have taken place entirely in his own mind. He also distinguishes these experiences from frightening, frequent hallucinations: they come when he visits Asakusa, and he finds them warm and strengthening. Because the visions comfort rather than torment him, he sees no reason to reject them. The narrative preserves that uncertainty; the parents’ return matters as an experience Hideo lives through, without establishing a definitive explanation for it.

Hideo understands the age difference as evidence that the relationship belongs to an imagined world. His parents are in their thirties, while he is forty-eight, and the woman’s identity as his mother initially reaches him through words spoken to his back rather than a conversation between parent and child. But once he pictures his parents smiling and welcoming him home, his earlier fear recedes. The impossible arrangement permits him to meet them not as the old people they might have become, but as the young parents held in his memory and longing.

A family life resumed in Asakusa

The return takes the form of ordinary companionship rather than a single dramatic revelation. Hideo’s parents welcome him into their home, and he joins in familiar domestic life. Their young appearance makes the reunion feel like a reversal of ordinary family time: the son has grown old, while the parents have returned at an age when they could not have raised him to adulthood in the real world.

The visits also bring back small disappointments and unfinished parts of childhood. Hideo remembers that his father had owned a regulation baseball but had considered it too dangerous for a small child. His father had been busy with his baseball league and sushi-shop companions, and the two had played catch with a rubber ball only once. When they later set out to play, the shops were mostly closed for the Bon festival, but the streets were still too active for a game. His father quickly proposed another direction, and Hideo found himself imagining him as more easygoing than the formidable figure remembered from childhood. The return thus gives Hideo not only a wished-for closeness, but also room to revise how he sees his father.

Hideo imagines that his parents may exist for him only during his visits. In his private picture, they spend the intervals occupied with work and play—or perhaps those intervals are a void in which they do not exist at all. He wonders whether he alone can breathe life into them. This thought makes the reunion feel precious and precarious: his presence seems to animate the family world, even as he knows that this account may be his own invention.

Limits on their return

The encounters are bounded by the parents’ apparent inability to leave their immediate surroundings freely. When Hideo suggests going to a sukiyaki restaurant near Kaminarimon Gate, he assumes that the trip will be manageable because he and his father have already gone some distance to play catch. His parents’ reaction surprises him. He had hoped a crowded restaurant might make it easier to say goodbye, but he withdraws the suggestion when he sees that it troubles them.

On the eventual walk toward Kaminarimon Gate, the three pass an eel shop where an attendant is grilling skewered livers. Hideo’s father stops and suggests that they each have one; the small proposal breaks a silence that has lasted since they left the apartment. Hideo then suggests visiting the temple to pray to the Goddess of Mercy and browsing the shops on the way. His father says they are not at liberty to do whatever they please, and his mother agrees that it would be nice if they could. Her tears and lowered shoulders contrast with the lively person who had played cards earlier. Hideo wants to retract his promise that this will be his last visit, but does not say that he will return.

Farewell and what remains

At the sukiyaki meal, Hideo’s parents encourage him to stop judging himself so harshly. He has just described himself as a failed husband and inadequate father, and has questioned his worth as a son. As he speaks, he realizes that he can see through his mother’s shoulders; his father’s shoulders and torso also begin to fade. His parents tell him they are proud of him and urge him to stand up for himself. Their reassurance arrives at the moment their return is ending, making the farewell both a loss and an answer to Hideo’s self-reproach.

Hideo watches as his father’s shoulders disappear and his mother’s face dims. He thanks them quietly, reluctant to draw the attention of the other diners, and is too devastated to cry. They vanish without a trace, leaving their chopsticks and sukiyaki bowls, half-empty beer glasses, a bag of figurine cakes, the soiled table, and two wrinkled cushions. The simmering meal remains, but his parents have gone before eating much. The ordinary objects make the departure concrete without resolving whether the reunion was supernatural or imagined.

Hideo gathers the two pairs of chopsticks they used and wraps them carefully in a handkerchief, forcing himself through his fatigue to preserve something from their last meal. Two years later, at the family grave in Aichi, he brings incense, a burner, and chrysanthemums. After praying alongside Mamiya, he thinks of bringing the chopsticks on his next visit and burning them in prayer. The keepsake gives him a continuing act of remembrance: the parents no longer return to the apartment, but Hideo can carry the material trace of their final meal into a later encounter with their memory.