This short story centers on a man who works at a crematorium, portraying the loneliness and devotion of someone who faces death as everyday labor. Through his relationship with a woman working at a hospital for the elderly, it quietly brings out the weight of sending off the dead, affection, and hesitation about one's work.

The work of a man who cremates the dead and hands bones to bereaved families reconsiders human dignity within love and daily life.

An Akutagawa Prize-winning work by So Aono. Centered on a man returning to Japan with his foreign wife, it depicts exhaustion with freedom, fractures in married life, and the unease of trying to return to a homeland and ordinary living. The work places the distortions of a subject shaped by life abroad and re-exposed to Japanese society within an autobiographical mode of narration and the atmosphere of its time.

A man searching for a place to return to is drawn once again into ordinary life and Japan after reaching the end of freedom.