A middle-class woman in Tokyo, Ishikawa Naoko lives with her husband in a shining new apartment building on a hill overlooking a slum. As her husband Eiichi becomes more entangled in his life as a businessman, Naoko looks for ways to expand her own life even as her husband's life shrinks in scope and intimacy. She loses her sense of security when she becomes acquainted with poverty in her neighborhood. She finds herself strangely drawn to a rag-picker, Ikona who lives down below in a tin shack with a blind child and a dog, and the sheltering comforts of her middle-class existence inexorably fall away.