In a 20th century American town, a young man spies on a decisive duel between his neighbor and her son.

A young boy grows up avoiding his abusive mother and idolizing two men in his life: his father and a boy in his class. But when both of his heroes betray him, he turns to his mother for comfort.

The children in a family grow tired of hosting their middle-aged cousin, but his expulsion brings unexpected strife to the family.

A series of vignettes about various sons along a family tree.

A young girl works to impress her highly critical parents and submits to a terrible fate as she struggles to meet their impossible standards.

A bitter divorcee and distant father having an affair with a younger, married woman gets a call that his son has gotten into trouble at boarding school. He travels to the school, where the headmaster says his son, who beat up another student, must transfer. In a series of events that makes him increasingly bitter, he ends up making his son's girlfriend cry in a restaurant.

In post-World War II Japan, a boy is raised by his frigid father without love and spends the rest of his life endlessly pursuing it.

As a boy grows to adulthood in the years encompassing WWII, and his understanding of the world changes, so too does his perception of his schoolteacher father evolve from respectable teacher to embarrassing clown to free-spirited man.

A middle-aged man faces a difficult decision; he can choose to use genetic alteration to have a say over the life of his unborn child, or leave the future up to chance. As he struggles to choose a path, he reconsiders his own past and the struggles he has faced.

The impact of an absent father emerges in the gruesome stories of a young daughter as her alcoholic mother listens and reflects on the struggles of raising her alone.