Ora Ora de Hitori Igumo

Momoko is seventy-five. Her husband has died and she is distant from her children. Living alone, she begins to hold conversations in her head, where the voices of her own loneliness keep her lively company.

With them she moves back and forth between her past and her present: leaving her home region for Tokyo in 1964, meeting her husband, Shuzo, the hectic and happy years of raising children, and now being on her own. The first-person passages are written in the dialect of north-eastern Japan. The title is taken from a poem by Kenji Miyazawa.