Synopsis
Yuuichi Okano is a baby boomer born and raised in Nagasaki. He has become so immersed in his hobbies-- drawing manga and performing as a musician-- that he’s neglected his work as a magazine ad sales rep.
“It’ll work out, it sure will. I’m telling you it will...” As he happily performs his original song in a café, a phone call cuts him off. He gives a dirty look on his audience, but it’s his cell phone that’s ringing, and the call is from his mother, Mitsue, telling him that some workers have come home to do some work on her sewage system. Because she’s been taken in by scam after scam and it’s obviously another one, he shouts at her not to pay them only to shake off his hat and expose the bald head that looks like a pecoross, a small onion. Mitsue’s dementia began soon after her husband, Satoru, passed away 10 years ago. She goes out to buy some sake for Satoru and gets taken back home by her grandson, Masaki; she waits for Yuuichi to come home in his parking space and almost gets run over; she fills up her drawers with her dirty underwear... facing all kinds of incoherent behaviors, Mitsue’s caretaker persuades a reluctant Yuuichi that it’s time to put her in a care home.
The care home she enters is a great one, however, where all patients join activities such as singing. Matsu, who’s turned back into a lovestruck high school girl; Yuri, who pesters everyone for candy; and Yojiro, who touches the breasts of the pretty caretakers... all patients with their weird and wonderful personalities happily welcome Mitsue; however, she closes her up in her room and keeps sewing invisible clothes, saying that she has to mend her Satoru’s suits.
Mitsue was the eldest of 10 brothers and sisters, so mending her baby brothers and sisters’ kimono worn out in their fieldwork was her chore. Even after she got married, she had hard times because Satoru drunk all his wages and in turn, his suits and their children’s clothes had all sorts of patches and darns.
Mitsue’s memories seem to gradually drift back to her past. One day, she says that Satoru, her childhood friend Chi-chan, and Mitsue’s younger sister Takayo, who died at the age of eight, have come to see her. As Yuuichi just simply answers, “yeah?”, she says, “they come to see me more often after they died”. With that, Yuuichi comes to think that becoming forgetful may not be all that bad.