Farewell to Father and Mother combines the two requiem texts Roppongi - Requiem for a Father (2007) and Mother and the Pencil (2013). When Josef Winkler spends some time in 2004 in the Tokyo district of Roppongi, he receives the news of his nearly hundred-year-old father's death. Just a year earlier, the old man had urged him to stay away from his funeral, as the son had not grown tired of disrupting the blessed peace of his Carinthian hometown with his writing hand. Some time later, the memoir Roppongi - Requiem for a Father appears, leading the reader to locations in Japan, Carinthia, and India. The requiem for Josef Winkler's mother, who passed away in 2011, is titled Mother and the Pencil, in which the mother repeatedly urges her left-handed son, who doodles at the kitchen table, to take the pencil in his right hand.