26-year-old Hachiko Hojo works as a train attendant, selling items on a cart. She's good at her job, but she lacks self confidence. One day, she meets a movie producer. They decide to visit tourist attractions in Hakone, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. Hachiko Hojo looks back upon her life along the way.

Based on the award-winning novel of the same name, this portrait of a group of vulnerable, variously wounded people — a depressed housewife, her high-school-aged lover, and his best friend, who is struggling to provide for himself and his senile grandmother — whose intersecting lives yield both sorrow and a fragile, yet enduring, hope for a brighter future.