Tokyo banker Shûkichi Sugiyama’s two surviving offspring, adult daughters Takako Numata and Akiko Sugiyama, live with him. He raised them on his own after his wife/their mother Kisako abandoned the family long ago. The father worries about both daughters in different ways. Takako has left her writer/translator husband Yasuo Numata without telling him, and she moves back to her father’s home with her and Yasuo’s 2-year-old daughter Michiko. Akiko, an English shorthand student who has no recollection of her mother, has been staying out to all hours of the night. Shûkichi and his daughters’ Aunt Shigeko believe that sullen Akiko needs a boyfriend to shake her out of her funk, and Auntie starts trying to find her an appropriate suitor. Akiko’s family doesn’t know that her tie to fellow college student Kenji Kimura is the reason for her uncommunicative sullenness—and why she has secretly been trying to raise ¥5,000. While Shûkichi takes some responsibility for both their problems—he had preferred Numata to Takako’s other suitor at the time, who might ultimately have been the better match—he’s more disappointed in Akiko than worried about her; he had given her more attention than Takako in their formative years because Akiko never really had a mother. And at just this time, their mother, whom they had presumed was long deceased, reenters their lives, seeming to at least want to have some sort of relationship with them. Kisako’s return has a profound effect on both Takako and Akiko, most specifically in how they view the recent goings-on in their own lives.