Orphaned as a child, a middle-aged TV script writer wanders back to Asakusa where he was born. "A forlorn air hung about the area . . . streets empty even at midday . . . the atmosphere of an old forgotten byway."
At the same time the area is somehow better than, say, Akasaka, where he works. Here in the old city people still smile, they still look you straight in the eye. "That's what's nice about Asakusa. You can still run into people like that around here."
And there he meets his father, a man who, if he were alive, would be well over 70, but who here is not yet 40, the age he was when he died -- a man who is now younger than his orphaned son.