A single mother, Kotoko Cocco struggles to care for her infant son, Daijiro, while不停 grappling with a blurry world caused by her double vision. This condition warps her perception and drags in terrifying doubles of the people she encounters. Amid the ongoing strain, Kotoko finds a disturbing rhythm: her body sometimes convulses toward self-harm, driven by a bleak curiosity about how long she can stay alive. Yet there is a strange relief whenever she sings, a momentary shield against the storm of visions that accompany her days.
An especially harrowing episode deepens the crisis: she believes she has dropped Daijiro from a roof, only to discover him miraculously safe in her apartment. The shock of that moment compounds her breakdown, and a separate attempt to cook a simple meal ends in a collapse of control. The consequences are severe—her son is taken away to be raised by her sister, marking a heartbreaking disruption in their fragile bond.
Time passes with intermittent glimmers of connection. Kotoko is permitted to visit Daijiro, and during the bus ride to her sister’s house she hums to herself, a private ritual that briefly steadies her mind. They share a tender, when fleeting, time together, but the return to her apartment leaves her feeling despondent, isolated, and unmoored once more.
On the roof one day, a man approaches her. He introduces himself as Seitaro Tanaka Shinya Tsukamoto and reveals that he has been following her after hearing her sing on the bus. His arrival unleash a particularly violent hallucination for Kotoko, yet after the moment passes, he reassures her that he means no harm. He reveals his identity as an award-winning novelist, and an uneasy connection begins to form between the two. The revised dynamic unsettles Kotoko, and when he first asks to date her, she responds by stabbing his right hand with a fork. He remains undeterred, a sign that this relationship could be as volatile as it is compelling.
Weeks later, after a television moment where he accepts an award, Kotoko consumes his new book in full and agrees to go on a proper date the next time he asks. Their evolving bond grows bolder, and during the next encounter she stabs him again—this time in the left hand. The cycle of trust and fear deepens as their relationship tightens around shared risk and mutual need.
One night, Tanaka hurries to Kotoko’s apartment to find her mid self-harming episode. He fetches towels and guards her until she seems to recover, and in a surprising move he proposes marriage. Kotoko refuses and sends him away, but he cannot quite let go. He returns, and when he discovers her again in distress, he helps her regain her breath and offers a path forward. He suggests they visit her son together, and during that visit Kotoko tells her sister that she intends to be happy from now on.
A moment of unexpected joy follows: Kotoko appears radiant in her own space, cheered by Tanaka’s quiet commitment, and she takes a dramatic step that underscores the strange bond between them. He has allowed her to cut him, to disfigure his face in a symbolically therapeutic act, and she responds by kissing the wound on his hand and then his bloodied face. The stark gesture marks a turning point in their relationship, a moment of fragile, uneasy happiness.
Tanaka moves in with Kotoko, and the two navigate a volatile, intense partnership. On a day when Kotoko expects to see two versions of Tanaka, she finds only one; she senses the world bending in the way it does when she sings. To mark this fragile moment, she performs a song for him, and the two weep together, moved by the shared vulnerability that their bond has revealed.
Then a letter arrives from Kotoko’s sister: Daijiro is being returned to her, signaling that Kotoko’s rehabilitation might be real and that her life could be rebuilt around motherhood again. She rushes to share the news with Tanaka, only to realize that he is no longer present in her apartment.
Daijiro returns to Kotoko’s life, and she eagerly welcomes him back. Yet happiness is short-lived as Kotoko experiences a terrifying relapse of her perceptions, hallucinating a duplicate of Daijiro. In this fractured state, she struggles to tell which version of her son is real, and the confusion erupts into tragedy: Daijiro stabs himself in the eye with a pencil.
The intensity of Kotoko’s visions escalates. She sees Daijiro climb toward the roof, then sees him on the street below, where a speeding car seems to strike him. In another terrifying turn, Daijiro appears alive again in her apartment, only to be transported into a warzone where a soldier shoots him in the head. Desperate to shield her child from harm, Kotoko considers smothering him in his sleep, but the moment collapses into a broader collapse of reality.
The world she inhabits becomes a sequence of fragmented sculptures, each a harsher image than the last. The final sculpture depicts a doll lying on a couch, with red material spilling from its head—a stark symbol of the pain and confusion that have consumed her. When she peeks beneath, she discovers another doll where her son should be, and a powerful white light washes over her.
She awakens in some form of institution, where outdoor access is limited to a smoking area. An orderly pushes the outside world back inside with a simple umbrella, and Kotoko dances in the rain as the mundane act of stepping outdoors becomes a rare, haunting freedom.
In the closing moments, it’s revealed that Daijiro is not dead after all and has grown into a teenager who visits his mother, sharing fragments of his life before departing in a quiet sense of well-being. The film circles back to the core question of what survives—the bond between mother and child and the fragile, sometimes dangerous, thread that holds a life together even as it succumbs to visions that refuse to stay buried.
