A brother returns home to find his room unchanged except for a single flower on the desk. His younger sister Akiko, who died in a traffic accident, appears as a ghost. She asks him for a date, claiming she has unfinished business. This opening story, Zansho, sets the tone for the collection: encounters with the dead, the weight of unspoken feelings, and the lingering heat of unresolved moments. Each of the seven short stories that follow explores similar emotional terrain, focusing on young people confronting loss, change, and the strangeness of ordinary life.

In the second story, a boy becomes obsessed with a girl he sees sitting on a telephone pole at a street intersection. His fixation leads him to uncover a tragic backstory involving a fatal accident. The third story follows a man who regularly brings flowers to a boarding house called Kaseiso, where a woman he loved once lived. Her death hangs over his visits, and the flowers become a ritual of remembrance. The fourth story, Dirty and Clean, examines a relationship marked by jealousy and betrayal, where a girl’s past actions come to light and force a reckoning. The fifth story, A and R, pairs a motorcycle and a former classmate’s lingering presence: a young man’s old bike is taken over by the girl he once admired, carrying forward a piece of his past. The sixth story, Papa’s Song, is a road trip with a pregnant woman and her husband, their conversation revealing the quiet tenderness and exhaustion of impending parenthood.

The final and longest story, Pochi no Basho, is set in an elementary school. Every day on the way to school, a large elderly dog blocks the sidewalk, forcing Takahashi and his classmates to take a detour. The dog becomes a nuisance, even discussed by the PTA. After school, the children stop at a candy store, despite rules against it. When the candy store is demolished and replaced by a convenience store, their hangout disappears. The old dog eventually dies. The other children walk straight to school as if nothing happened, but Takahashi still takes the detour, unable to act as if the loss never mattered. The story quietly captures how small, seemingly insignificant things shape a child’s world and how growing up means learning to live with what remains.

The collection spans nearly two decades of the author’s career, from his debut to later works. Some stories have supernatural elements—ghosts, unexplained presences—while others are purely grounded in everyday reality. All of them deal with young people learning that the world is stranger and more sorrowful than they expected, and that moving forward requires carrying the past with them. No single protagonist ties the stories together, but recurring themes of death, regret, unrequited love, and the inevitable erosion of the familiar create a cohesive emotional arc. The setting shifts between homes, streets, schools, and boarding houses, always rendered with a delicate, understated touch that leaves room for the reader to read between the lines.