Yuta Hanabusa runs an auto repair shop in a section of Tokyo beside the Sumida River. His daughter Yukari has an uncommon interest in what happened to her aunt, Sakiko, during World War II, but her father tends to avoid the topic. At last Yuta begins to unfold to his daughter what befell her aunt during the war. In the terror of the March 10, 1945 air raid, when America's B-29s rained death upon Tokyo as a preface to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Sakiko lost her little girl. For all of forty-five years Sakiko has been waiting for her child to return, frequently standing near the telephone pole which survived the holocaust, the last place she saw the girl. After Sakiko passed away, a Japanese woman with a Korean name of Lee Soon-ik, comes back from Korea to look for her long lost mother. Yukari wonders if she is her aunt's daughter who had long been missing...
