As he wafts in the fresh scent of May wind, his cousin asks for the time. After hearing the response, he grabs for their watch and admires it. He tells him the contraption is cheap but that it does the job. His cousin has hearing problems that started after he got hit in the ear with a baseball in primary school. This partial deafness doesn’t hold him back, and he gets good grades, but every once in a while he loses complete hearing in both ears and he has to take time off from school. 

He asks his cousin why he doesn’t have a watch and he tells them he doesn’t have a need to constantly know the time of day, and, if he does, he can always ask. At 10:32, a brand new bus rolls up the street and they board together. The bus is not the normal one they take, and they begin to worry they took the wrong ride. His cousin questions him about his time at school and when he asks why he doesn’t see his childhood friends anymore, he lies and says they just live far away. 

Sitting beside them is a group of about fifteen older passengers who are tan and skinny and looked like they were dressed for hiking. His cousin proceeds to tell him about his visits to the ear doctor and worries that the treatment he’s about to get will hurt. 

That spring, he’d quit his advertising job in Tokyo and broke up with his college girlfriend. A month later, when his grandmother died of cancer, he’d returned to the town he grew up in for the first time in five years. After the funeral, he’d returned to Tokyo to search for a new job but instead spent the whole time holed up in his apartment reading and listening to records. One day, his aunt had visited him and asked him to take her son to his doctor’s appointment. He and his cousin were about a decade apart in age and had never been close, but he agreed. 

After seven or eight more stops, his cousin nervously asks him if they are there yet. His cousin asks him if he plans to work at his father’s printing company in Kobe, but he lies that he has other commitments in Tokyo. When they arrive at the hospital, he eats breakfast while his cousin is examined. The only other people on the floor are members of a small family. 

Eight years ago, he’d been at the town’s other hospital when his girlfriend’s friend had an operation on her ribs. He’d driven to the hospital with his friend on a motorcycle with a box of chocolates for the girlfriend, and shortly after the hospital visit his friend had died. He remembered some of the conversation the three of them had had at the hospital and how the girlfriend had drawn a picture of a woman asleep in a house on the top of a hill surrounded by blind willows on a napkin. She told them that a blind willow is a species of her own creation that has a lot of pollen and that tiny flies covered in this substance that crawl into ears send women into deep sleep. He noticed that her tree resembled an azalea more than a willow. 

That summer, the girlfriend had written a long poem about the blind willow, in which a man climbed up the hill to rescue the woman from her sleep. Her boyfriend was upset when she told him it wasn’t him and that by the time the fictitious man reached the woman she had been devoured by the flies. 

At 12:20, his cousin comes back from his examination and refuses to say how it went. They ate lunch next to a couple talking about lung cancer. His cousin shares that his occasional hearing loss doesn’t bother him, but that it’s just sometimes inconvenient. His cousin then questions him about the meaning of a John Ford movie he’d recently watched. After they shared a laugh, his cousin asked him to look in his ears. When he does, he imagines his deceased friend’s girlfriend’s ear flies, but he tells his cousin he sees nothing unusual and his cousin looks disappointed.

On their way back from the hospital, they catch an older bus and he remembers how the box of chocolates they’d delivered to the girlfriend had melted by the time they reached her because he and his friend had stopped at the beach on their way to the hospital that day. His cousin asks him if he’s alright and he comes to his senses and boards the bus.