In the film’s opening moments, a recently widowed mother, Shige (Otowa Nobuko), and her eleven-year-old son, Hideo (Osawa Kenzaburo), arrive from rural Nagano to the heart of Tokyo in search of opportunity and prosperity. Without descending into despair or easy cynicism, the film gradually dismantles such expectations over its summer-long narrative timeline, which pivots early on the unexpected separation of the two fresh-faced newcomers. Unbeknownst to Hideo, Shige has already lined up a job at a family-run ryokan, leaving the boy to run errands for his uncle’s struggling vegetable shop and learn the mean streets of Tokyo alone. A blossoming friendship with Junko (Ichiki Futaba), an innkeeper’s chipper young daughter, steers the tone toward lighthearted picaresque, but both children steadily uncover the cold, calculating, amoral ways of the adult world in jam-packed compositions that mix youthful spirit with hard truths—all of which leads to a denouement that situates the film in an odd limbo between family entertainment and bleak parable. – Carson Lund

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