Tokyo, 1962. Shūhei Hirayama (Chishū Ryū) is an ageing widower with a 32-year-old married son, Kōichi (Keiji Sada), and two unmarried children, 24-year-old daughter Michiko (Shima Iwashita) and 21-year-old son Kazuo (Shin'ichirō Mikami). The ages of the children and what they respectively remember about their mother suggests that she died just before the end of the war, perhaps in the bombing of Tokyo in 1944-45. Since his marriage, Kōichi has moved out to live with his wife in a small flat, leaving Hirayama and Kazuo to be looked after by Michiko.