An innocent puppy love leads to an unwanted pregnancy and Hikari, a 14-year-old schoolgirl from Nara, is forced to give up her baby for adoption. Five hundred kilometres further away, in Tokyo, Sotoko and her husband, Kiyokazu, a childless couple, have problems getting pregnant. Kiyokazu struggles with feelings of despair and guilt because of his imposed traditional values: what kind of a husband is he, if he cannot give his wife children? This drives him to eventually ask for a divorce. But when the couple meets Baby Baton – who cares for women who have unwanted pregnancies and who looks for adoptive parents for the babies – everything seems to fall into place: they adopt little boy Asato, Hikari’s baby.
Satoko and Kiyokazu enjoy their happiness as a family, until Hikari shows up on their doorstep years later, when Asato is already a young toddler. The woman with bleached hair and a loud bomber jacket, who demands to have her child or money, looks nothing like the insecure 14-year-old who gave up her baby for adoption. Satoko and Kiyokazu are flabbergasted. Is this Asato’s biological mother? Or is this a con artist looking to score big?
Director Naomi Kawase adapted the novel, by the same name, by Japanese writer Mizuki Tsjumura in lyrical, sunlit imagery, and delicate and sentimental scenes. Through flashbacks, the film depicts the motherly love from a biological mother and an adoptive mother: both of them are ‘true mothers’.
