Plot summary

Long widowed Kanji Watanabe, the current Senior Chief of Public Affairs, is a thirty year bureaucrat at City Hall. Like most of the senior bureaucrats, he is a proverbial paper-pusher: doing a lot of work (he not having taken a day off in thirty years) while really accomplishing nothing that betters the city. He once had dreams of doing great things but fell into the trap that is the non-functioning of City Hall in hitting roadblocks at every turn when he tried to do anything of substance. He is biding his time to get his retirement bonus and saves every penny eventually to pass along to his now grown son, Mitsuo. What he is unaware of is that Mitsuo and his wife Kazue care nothing for him in he never having been a present father, they only now expecting that money so that they can buy their own modern house. Kanji's outlook changes when he is told by his physician that he has a mild ulcer, which he is told by another patient in the know that that is code for stomach cancer in they being unable to do anything for him. The true prognosis is six months to live, the cancer and his imminent death which he tells to no one in his family or social circle. Kanji's unfocused change in outlook changes once again in meeting a pulp fiction novelist. While he doesn't know what to do in that subsequent change, it eventually becomes a little more focused in a chance encounter with a young woman in his department named Toyo, who has a young person's zest for life and a keen sense of observation, she understanding the nature of all the people with who she works and understanding that if she stays at City Hall much longer that she will eventually turn into one of them.—Huggo