The character most commonly identified as the old woman in the story is Chiyoko Fujiwara, the celebrated actress in her later years who serves as both the subject and the narrator of the film's retrospective interview, although the narrative also presents a spectral old crone who appears to her at crucial moments. Chiyoko was born during the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, an event that took the life of her father. As a schoolgirl, she was scouted by the general manager of the Ginei film studio to appear in a government-sponsored production during the Second Sino-Japanese War, a path her mother opposed because she wanted Chiyoko to inherit the family confectionery store. Before she could decide, she met a young political dissident painter who was fleeing the police and hid him in the family storehouse. The next day he departed for Manchuria, leaving behind a key to his box of art supplies, and Chiyoko vowed to reunite with him. She became an actress in the hope that he would see her on screen and find her, and that single purpose shaped the course of her entire life.

When the film opens in the present day, Chiyoko is an elderly woman who has lived as a recluse for thirty years after abruptly retiring from acting. She has become shy about publicity and her first instinct is to remain withdrawn, but she gradually warms to the documentarian Genya Tachibana, who returns to her the key she lost decades earlier. The key unlocks her memory, and her account unfolds as a seamless blend of personal history, subjective recollection, and the many roles she played in films ranging from historical dramas to postwar domestic pictures, monster films, and science fiction. Her personality in old age is defined by the same devotion that carried her through her youth. She never forgot the artist, and she carries both the tenderness of that first love and a clear-eyed honesty about what time has done to her. At one point she acknowledges that she is no longer the girl the artist had met, a recognition prompted by seeing the spectral old woman in her own reflection.

The old woman's motivation in the present day is to honour the retrospective interview, the first she has granted in thirty years, and to tell the story of the life that her love for the painter set in motion. That love is less about possessing the man than about the act of pursuit itself. Late in the story she concludes that it does not matter whether she ever sees the artist again, because what she truly loved was the search for him and the person she became while searching. This realisation resolves the inner conflict embodied by the spectral crone, an old woman with a spinning wheel who appears in several of her visions and film roles and who offers a cursed tea promising that Chiyoko will burn forever in the flames of eternal love. That figure represents Chiyoko's fear of aging, her self-doubt, and the pain her endless pursuit caused her, and it is sometimes read as a projection of her own future self. Her capacity to accept herself at the end, to embrace the journey rather than the destination, is what finally allows her to face that figure without fear.

Her key relationships shape her development throughout the story. The unnamed painter, referred to as the man with the key, is the catalyst of her life's journey, and the key he gave her becomes the central symbol of hope and purpose in her narrative. With Genya Tachibana she shares a bond that spans decades: as a young studio assistant he rescued her when an earthquake collapsed the set of her final film, and he is the one who picked up the key she dropped that day, kept it for years, and returned it to her at the start of the interview. In her final moments she thanks him for rekindling her memories and for reviving the young girl she had been. Her relationships with the actress Eiko Shimao and the director Junichi Otaki are more complicated. Eiko, driven by jealousy of Chiyoko's youth and innocence, secretly stole the key during a film shoot, and Otaki, who had coerced Eiko into the theft so that he could marry Chiyoko, kept it hidden in their home until she discovered it years later. A scarred former military policeman who had pursued the artist in the past later approached her on a journey of atonement and handed her a letter from him, prompting her final, fruitless trek to Hokkaido. She never learns that the artist was tortured to death, a truth that Tachibana withholds from her in order to protect the peace she has found.

In terms of abilities, the old woman is distinguished by versatility and range as an actress. Her career carried her through the major eras and genres of Japanese cinema, and the film presents her as a performer who drew on her own deepest feelings, blurring the boundary between her roles and her real emotions. She is also defined by resilience. The repeated pattern of her life, pursuit, loss, and renewed hope, continues even into old age, and her final journey is no longer physical but emotional, as she comes to understand that the chase itself gave her life its meaning. Her development culminates in peaceful acceptance. On her deathbed she is grateful and complete, and in her final vision she departs toward the far reaches of space, having finally reconciled the girl she once was with the old woman she became.