When a screenwriter named KAORU dies suddenly, she leaves behind a tangle of relations who are all pulled together for the final act in her life: performing her funeral. The chief mourner is her ex-husband, Jun. A failed actor, he drifts around Tokyo as a driver for callgirls. He has to clean himself up to lead the ceremony down in the small village in Okayama that KAORU came from. There, he meets a host of eccentric characters, TV people, and KAORU ’s daughter, all of whom have complicated feelings for the recently departed. As can be guessed, the funeral becomes chaotic as people quarrel and fight but the fact that KAORU was loved is not in doubt as nostalgia, bitterness, and affection for the woman come out from each mourner in comic confrontations.

After the death of his wife, Kenzaburō receives an unexpected letter from beyond the grave. His late wife asks him to travel to Lake Windermere in England with their son to scatter her ashes. Plagued by sweet and painful memories of his wife, Kenzaburō travels to England from Tokyo to fulfill her final wish, but the father and son's fraught relationship threatens to upend their journey.