Rieko Saibara

Natsumi (Kie Kitano) moves to Tokyo to enter a fine arts university. In Tokyo, Natsumi meets Ryosuke and they soon become a couple. Ryosuke is a good person, but he doesn't have a job. Every day he just loafs around. To pay for her living expenses, Natsumi begins work at bar. Natsumi and Ryosuke become estranged from each other. They decide to break up. Natsumi's book is finally published.

Natsumi (Kie Kitano) moves to Tokyo to enter a fine arts university. In Tokyo, Natsumi meets Ryosuke and they soon become a couple. Ryosuke is a good person, but he doesn't have a job. Every day he just loafs around. To pay for her living expenses, Natsumi begins work at bar. Natsumi and Ryosuke become estranged from each other. They decide to break up. Natsumi's book is finally published.

Rieko Saibara is a cartoonist and mother of a 6-year-old boy and 4-year-old girl. When she has a difficult time, she throws away her problems with laughter. Her husband Kamoshitda used to be a war camera man, but now he's addicted to alcohol. He struggles to overcome his problem, but keeps failing. Finally, they get divorced. After Kamoshida loses his family, he realizes how precious they are. He focuses on getting away from alcohol, but another disease comes to him. Even though Saibara knows that he can not make it for long, she accepts him back to her family again. Since then a happy, but short, time exists for the family of four.

Naoko returns home with her young daughter, where her mother Masako runs the only beauty parlor in town. The local women go there to pass the time lamenting their bad luck with men and laughing over dirty jokes. Unbeknownst to them, Naoko has been secretly seeing her former teacher, Kashima.

The story of the original manga writer Rieko Saibara is depicted by her alter ego Natsumi Takahara who revisits where she was raised and recalls her childhood and how everything turned out.

A young Japanese boy's life is changed when his sister returns to the small island, full of eccentric characters, where he lives.