Koichi, now 65, makes a quiet yet defiant choice: he brings his 90-year-old mother—whose days are numbered—home from the care facility to the Satoyama hills of Hitachiomiya, Ibaraki, where she can spend her final summer surrounded by the land that raised them both. As fragile days slip away amid the whispering clear streams and gentle green of northern Ibaraki, buried questions rise like mist: Why did she truly leave? What pain drove her from the child who needed her most?
