A narrator living in the German university town of Goettingen is visited by a friend who had been missing since the Great East Japan Earthquake. As the pressures of the pandemic meet the memory of the disaster, the novel traces the boundary between reality and recollection in a hushed, elegiac style, while looking at the distances between people and across time.

A friend long thought missing appears in a German city, and memory and loss begin to overlap in quiet, unsettling ways.