Taeko is 27, unmarried, has lived her whole life in Tokyo and now works at a company there. She decides to take another trip to visit her elder sister's in-laws in the rural countryside to help with the safflower harvest and get away from city life. While traveling at night on a train to Yamagata, she begins to recall memories of herself as a fifth-grade schoolgirl in 1966, and her intense desire to go on holiday like her classmates. During her stay in Yamagata, she finds herself increasingly nostalgic and wistful for her childhood self, while simultaneously wrestling with adult issues of career and love. The trip dredges up forgotten memories, the first stirrings of childish romance, puberty and growing up, the frustrations of math and boys. In lyrical switches between the present and the past, Taeko wonders if she has been true to the dreams of her childhood self.While mostly realistic in its depiction of Taeko, the expressionistic influences in Takahata's work are often marked by scenes where a character's imagination comes to life on screen. After Taeko encounters her first love, she dreams of rising from her bed into a red-colored sky. The scene ends with her slow return to earth, then cuts to an outside shot of her house where a giant heart emerges from her window. These expressionistic sequences run counter to Takahata's realistic storyline, but are consciously used by the director to transition back and forth from reality to the unreal world of animated fantasy, leveraging the advantages of animation in order to develop the character.