Story about Gonenme no Hitori / 五年目のひとり / 独自一人的第五年
Junior high school student Matusnaga Ami (Makita Aju) is on her way home from a cultural festival wh...
Junior high school student Matusnaga Ami (Makita Aju) is on her way home
from a cultural festival when she is stopped by a middle-aged male
stranger (Watanabe Ken) at an overhead bridge. The man says he saw her
dance on stage at the festival. It was beautiful and the best. This
unexpected praise gets Ami ecstatic. But her mother Akie (Itaya Yuka)
becomes very concerned after hearing this and even makes a fuss
by calling the police to the house. Several days later, Ami happens to
see the same man again and learns that he works part-time at a small
bakery called Kokodake no Panya along a desolate shopping street. It
seems that this man Kizaki Shuji had been hospitalised for a compound
fracture for almost six months and moved from his hometown to this town
in Tokyo at the invitation of an acquaintance Hanamiya Kyoko (Ichihara
Etsuko) to work for free as social rehabilitation. Ami does not think he
is a bad man like her mother suspects. She gradually begins to open up
to him through their conversations. Then one day, she hears about
Kizaki’s circumstances from the bakery owner, Ueno Hiroshi (Takahashi
Katsumi). In fact, Kizaki lost his family of eight in the tsunami caused
by the Great East Japan Earthquake five years ago and his emotional
scars have still not been healed. This is the story of the aftermath and
rebirth through the unlikely interaction between a middle-aged man and a
teenage girl.
