Abstract

Nineteen-year-old aspiring novelist Yume lives in a delicate balance with her mother Kii-chan and her grandmother, whom she calls by the derogatory Babā in her head. The ninety-year-old, Koshu-dialect-speaking woman is railing against the idea of getting cataract surgery. Over the past year she has weakened considerably, and Yume and Kii-chan’s lives revolve around her care. Yume often finds herself having to stick up for her mother when Babā complains—which is always, since even when she’s not dissatisfied she doesn’t show her true feelings. And she has the gall to bring her son Yuichi up when she doesn’t get her way.
The fact is that Kii-chan is taking care of her ex-mother-in-law despite the fact that Yume’s father Yuichi cheated on her and left when the other woman got pregnant. He tried to take his mother with him, but she lasted less than a month before walking back to Kii-chan and Yume’s house a whole train station’s distance away on her own with no shoes on. Yume knows that Kii-chan feels indebted to her grandmother for helping out when she was a baby, but she doesn’t understand why that should lead to their current situation.
Yume and Kii-chan have planned a short vacation, just one night, but on the eve of it Babā collapses. In the ambulance, Yume thinks about how their trip will have to be canceled even though she knows she shouldn’t be worrying about that. Her boyfriend pings to ask her about their upcoming Christmas Eve date; she leaves the planning up to him because she’s busy.
Yuichi shows up and Yume goes off on him for abandoning his mother in their care, but he just lets it go in one ear and out the other. He takes her out to a cafe and pressures her to eat something even though she’s not hungry, as if feeding her fulfills his parental duty. He hands over an envelope of money for expenses, apologizing that funds are tight, but Yume knows his kid goes to a private school and that the family went on a vacation to Okinawa. He shows off videos of his son, who is in second grade.
Some time passes and Yume meets her boyfriend Wataru for their date, but she’s in a foul mood because, among other annoyances, on her way out she found that Babā had a bathroom accident on her slippers. Wataru decides she is mad at him for being late, and then guesses it must be that she’s on her period. Later he gets offended that she would bring up supermarket sashimi while they’re eating out at a nice restaurant (more than hinting at how expensive it is), even though she was just sharing a happy memory and not intending to compare. They have sex, which means things stay unresolved. Yume stays up late working and also checks her dad’s Facebook, which is mostly posts about his son.
She doesn’t have many memories with her dad. Most vividly she remembers when he ripped her favorite book in half when she tried to ask her parents for money to take an editor up on a joint publishing deal. He crushed her dreams, and his mother continues to scoff at them.
In the new year, Yume turns 20, so she’s officially an adult now. On Coming of Age Day, she sees other girls in fancy kimono on her way to work and can hardly believe they are the same age as her. Outside the office, she runs into her supervisor at the temp agency. He treats her like a child and tells her to be grateful for how well the company she’s assigned to treats her. She hopes they will hire her as a proper employee with the better salary and so on that entails.
Babā collapses again. Yume finds it hard to stomach how all the nurses think her grandmother is such a lovely lady because they don’t know how rude and ungrateful she is at home. After Babā falls again at the hospital and breaks a bone, Yuichi shows up with a fruit basket and says all the things Babā wants to hear. Babā starts complaining about Kii-chan to him, which Yume absolutely refuses to tolerate because she knows how hard Kii-chan has devoted her life to this woman. She goes off on her but starts to cry, which her dad just decides is hysterics.
On Yume’s way home from the hospital, she happens to stop by a bookstore and see that she passed the first screening in the lit contest she submitted to. She’s thrilled, but Kii-chan reacts as if she were a little kid who won a prize. To Yume, debuting as an author is when her life will actually begin, so she’s desperate.
Babā comes back from the hospital and they meet with her care manager. She always forgets that he is married with children and tries to hook him up with Kii-chan.
Yume can’t get ahold of her dad, and he hasn’t paid them. Kii-chan asks to borrow some money, and her health starts to decline due to stress, so Yume does some Facebook sleuthing and finds out that her dad will be at a soccer event for his son. She tries to get Kii-chan to go with her to confront him, but she refuses.
Yuichi is completely absorbed in the game and hardly listens to Yume. He says he has debts that he has been keeping secret from even his wife, so they have to hang on a bit more. Yume picks up shifts at a cafe to make extra money and feels a huge gap between her and the college kids working there, even though they are the same age.
She calls Wataru because she’s stressed, but he is patronizing. After they have sex, he realizes the condom had broken. They go get a morning after pill the next day, and she remembers hearing how her grandmother had a stillborn, but she can’t reconcile the idea of a younger Babā mourning her child with the current Babā who is so insufferable.
Finally some good news: Yume gets hired as an official employee. She buys cake on the way home to celebrate. But she comes out of the shower to find Babā stealing money out of her purse. She claims she wants to buy a videogame for her grandson, and Yume screams at her that this is the money they have to live on and throws the cake on the floor when Kii-chan suggests they all calm down.
Part one of the cataract surgery finally happens after being postponed. Soon, Kii-chan is too ill to get out of bed. Babā has lost one of her artificial teeth, exposing a wire in her mouth. While eating breakfast, the wire gets caught on the underside of her tongue, causing pain and panic. Yume has to take her to the dentist, but that means she has to get her ready and give her her eye drops, which is all incredibly frustrating. The novels Yume writes always come to an end, but really life just keeps going and going.

Author’s Information

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