A girl going through puberty hopelessly tries to hold onto childhood during a day at the beach, but meddling mothers push her to grow up.

A child observes their father’s strange obsession with dressing up the pole in their front yard as they grow up.

A woman examines a period of time in her childhood spent with her sister and the babysitter's son, viewing it through the lens of an adult, and ponders how the experience might have shaped her as a person.

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

After her son dies, a mother reckons with the grandson he left behind.

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.

A young boy, who is still unaware of his future in which his mother dies and he becomes a miserable, unaccomplished middle-aged man, lives through an ever-so-slightly unusual day which would later become the one and only core memory he has of his mother.

A rambunctious teenager with an inquisitive mind causes much grief for all his New England family and neighbors when he visits them in the summer of 1914, on the eve of World War I.

After a ten-year-old boy joins his parents in bidding his grandfather farewell as he leaves New York for Germany, he experiences the first major loss of his youth and struggles to understand the complexity of the experience.

Following his breakup, a Japanese college student uses savings from his relationship as a means to quit his summer mowing job, but not without first helping a woman who asks, but doesn't appear to need, for her lawn to be mowed.