A person is taking their cousin to a doctor’s appointment. They are waiting for the bus. The cousin is partially deaf after an accident with a baseball during school. He lives a normal life but the severity of his lack of hearing varies. This creates obstacles for him at school.

The person is wearing a watch. The younger cousin asks for the time and inquiries about the quality of the watch. The person explains that even cheap watches may be accurate.

The person struggles to converse and interact with their cousin. It has been five years since the person has been home. They are now twenty-five. The cousin is fourteen.

The bus arrives. They board. It is a new bus. They talk about school and friends. The person explains that they do not see their friends because they do not live close together. This description is not entirely accurate but it is all they are able to say.

The previous spring the person lost their job, broke up with their girlfriend, lost their grandma to cancer, and had to move back home. They planned on returning to Tokyo after the funeral but did not ever leave. They were asked by their aunt to take their cousin to the hospital appointment. They were never close but people often assumed them to be. The person never understood why until they could be close until they were sitting together on the bus. The cousin mentions that the person could work for their father. This is news to the person who plans on returning to Tokyo despite the fact that there is nothing for them there. They feel they cannot stay in their home area.

They arrive at the hospital. The cousin wants to go to the appointment alone, so the person goes to the cafeteria to wait. They sit and drink coffee and look out the window. They feel like they had seen this scene before, even though they had never been inside this hospital before.

Eight years previously they had been in a hospital visiting the girlfriend of their friend. She had minor surgery. They and their friend drove on a motorcycle to the hospital. They got chocolates on their way there. Soon after this trip, the friend died.

The person remembers visiting the girl in the cafeteria where she ate a lot. They remember looking out the windows and smelling the hospital smell. They remember her drawing a picture on a napkin and telling a story about it. It was a woman sleeping in a house on a hill. The house is surrounded by blind willows, which are a tree full of pollen and flies that the girl made up. The tree is what makes the woman go to sleep because the flies crawl in her ears and eat her flesh. He remembers that the girl eventually wrote a poem about the blind willow and the sleeping woman.

In one of her stories about the woman and the willow, a man comes to save her but she is already dead.

Later, the cousin, appearing unfocused, meets the person. They eat lunch in the cafeteria. They talk about the cousin’s appointments. He explains that his lack of hearing does not bother him so much as it is inconvenient. He brings up John Ford’s Fort Apache. He tells the person about a line in the movie where John Wayne says that if you see something, it is not there. The cousin extends this idea to hearing and that he thinks of it anytime someone tries to sympathize with his hearing. The cousin asks the person to look in his ears. The person looks. He thinks of the story of the woman who had flies and pollen in her ears.

The cousin asks if the person saw anything. They respond that it all looks normal. This seems to disappoint the cousin. When the cousin points out that the bus has arrived, the person is stuck in memory and cannot stand up. They are thinking about the chocolates they got for their friend in the hospital. They had melted entirely because they had stopped at the beach on their way to the hospital. They think this was self-centered.

The cousin asks if the person is okay. They all board the bus. The person responds that they are okay.