Moving and powerful, this novel is the diary of Utsugi, a seventy-seven-year-old man with refined tastes, who is known in the last months of his life due to illness.
Utsugi recounts in him the details of his passionate obsession with Satsuko, the attractive wife of his son, a former chorus girl with a dark past and perhaps the only reason that keeps him wanting to stay alive. She uses it to get extravagant and luxurious gifts, in exchange for carefully thought-out freedoms to keep her father-in-law excited.
Although the protagonist also tells in this newspaper his tormented fight against the signs of aging and some episodes of his family routine, the central axis is undoubtedly the growing passion that Satsuko provokes in him, a passion that will have fatal consequences.