Merry Christmas

This is rather a story of irony, where the one who calls the city a fool is but a fool himself, though perhaps it simply takes one to know one. When he declares that Tokyo hasn't changed a bit, he's talking about the character of the city, that despite any and all physical changes, it remains a bustling city where important things get buried over and over by superficiality. And when they resurface, it takes only while to rebury again, because as is the nature of Tokyo, things keep moving, and life keeps going. In his aimlessness, Kasai meets the daughter of someone one might consider important to him, yet throughout his recollection, we see that the bond he'd shared with Shizueko's mother was, at least for him, rather superficial; he never understood her, nor cared to, and often went to her only for what she was able to give him. In fact, at the thought that Shizueko might be attracted to him, he showed no hesitance in choosing lust over his rare friendship, and the whole time that Shizueko was next to him, he was never sincerely thinking about her as a person, but rather another animation of his idea of a 'woman'. Throughout the story we see that he repeatedly only pretends to understand, and even when he's perfectly capable of acting with sincerity and decency when reality slams him in the face, a few cups of sake is all it takes to revert him back to his empty self. Life goes on, and no matter what physical changes occur in Tokyo (be it the loss of a person or the presence of foreigners), the spirit of it remains the same, because there was nothing of essence in the first place.

Discussion: On some level, Kasai did seem to truly treasure his bond with Shizueko's mother.  Do you think things would have been different if Kasai had reunited with Shizueko elsewhere?