Hirayama is content with his life as a toilet cleaner in Tokyo. Outside of his structured routine, he cherishes music on cassette tapes, books, and taking photos of trees. Through unexpected encounters, he reflects on finding beauty in the world.
In a Japan of the near future, the government program Plan 75 encourages senior citizens to be voluntarily euthanized to remedy a super-aged society. An elderly woman whose means of survival are vanishing, a pragmatic Plan 75 salesman, and a young Filipino laborer face choices of life and death.
Shunsaku was paralyzed from the neck down at the young age of 36 by a spinal injury suffered in a motorcycle accident. A blind woman named Hanae arrives to be his caregiver. Despite her frustrations with Shusaku's ill-nature and verbal abuse, Hanae also harbors a tremendous sense of being deprived that she doesn't tell others.
Kei Omori is a caregiver who has left his previous job at a small-scale care service to come work at a large-scale nursing home. But he is unable to hide his tremendous discomfort with a management style that prioritizes efficiency and risk control in the name of accommodating large numbers of residents. It is under these circumstances that Mieko, an elderly woman living with dementia, moves into the nursing home.
Five short stories from five different directors set ten years in Japan's future.
Ko, a man in his late 30s, lives in the countryside with his wife and teenage son. Mitsuhiko, who runs a local car dealership, also stayed in his hometown. One day, their mutual friend Eisuke returns from a long military operation and their reunification brings back both pleasant and painful memories.
Utsumi and Seto's daily routine is to spend their afterschool hours just jabbering with one another along a riverbed. Getting excited over trivial word play, agonizing over the content of an email to be sent to a girl, and, at times, talking about a serious problem, the two endlessly engage in meaningless idle talk as if it were meaningful.
Nursing home "Yuyoso". Many lonely old people live there, including botanist Taro Makiso, a physicist, an actor, a bar mom, and a chef. Maki has spent most of his life studying botany, and has lived without regard for entertainment, drinking, women, or everything else in the world. Then came my 80th birthday. He and a young staff member go digging for wild yam and find a mysterious golden flower. It was the flower of immortality, the "Golden Flower", which was said to bloom beside the Himalayan Virgin, which he had been looking for for many years. From that day onwards, fragments of memories from his youth, which he had intentionally sealed off in order to immerse himself in botany, surged into Maki in a whirlpool.
A doll maker and his daughter Erika live in a remote mountain villa. When some thugs break in and murder Erika and disfigure the old doll maker, he sets about getting his revenge. He creates a life-size doll and has it possessed by Erika's spirit. The doll then tracks down Erika's killers one-by-one...
The Rinkaiji family, by all appearances, is a well-to-do Japanese family. The father, Nariyuki, works in an elite corporation, which gives his wife Yoshiko status in their suburban neighborhood. But the daughter Sugina, who herself has secretly stopped going to school because she is being bullied. One day, they discover that Nariyuki has quit his job. As Nariyuki decides to find a new job along with Sugina, Yoshiko, a firm believer in a life based on the company, soon finds her world falling apart.
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