A Japanese college-student is on his own for the first time in university. The only issue with the university was that it was probably run by right-wing fanatics. The student feels that it doesn't really matter who runs the dormitory. The student has a roommate who is a clean freak and sometimes has a stutter. The roommate aspires to be a mapmaker and finds it odd that the Japanese man doesn't really know why he is studying drama other than the fact that he is fine with it. The roommate becomes annoying as he wakes up early and exercises loudly in the room. The Japanese man confronts him, but no solution is reached.

Shortly thereafter, the Japanese man is traveling by train and runs into a girl from his past. The girl laughs as the Japanese man recounts his roommate's fixed nature. They both decide to get off the train somewhere in Japan and catch up. They did not have much to say. The girl asks to see him again. He says yes. They go their separate ways.

She had been the Japanese man's best-friend's girlfriend. He had committed suicide when he was seventeen after skipping school to play pool with the Japanese man. The Japanese man suspects that the girl resents him for being the last person to see her boyfriend alive. After his friend's death, the man began to see death in a new way. He sees it as alongside him and not separate from life.

After this, the two began dating once or twice a month. The relationship did not seem to be going anywhere, but they stayed together. They did not have much to say to each other. Seasons passed and their relationship and time-together was often mundane. The Japanese man suspected the girl was longing for someone else's warmth.

His friends at school would tease him and ask if he was getting any. He would says he cannot complain.

His eighteenth year passed like that. He did not have many friends and spent so much time reading that people thought he wanted to be a writer. He did not want to be anything. He longed to tell her about his emotions but could not.

Seasons passed. That winter a lot of things happened. He spent New Year's with her. His roommate got sick, and he helped nurse him back to health. He got into a fistfight. He turned nineteen.

In June, she turned twenty. The Japanese man had a hard time imagining their aging and their dead friend's eternal state of seventeen.

He spent her birthday with her. She talked for hours. More than she seemed to have ever talked to him. He eventually interrupts her and tells her he ought to be going. She breaks down. He comforts her. They sleep together. He asks why she never slept with their dead friend. In the morning he writes her a letter explaining that he does not know if seeing her again is the best idea. He leaves and receives a response months later, in June. She is receiving treatment in a psychiatric hospital. She tells him not to worry and that none of it is his fault. She says that if they ever meet again, she can hopefully tell him more.

The Japanese man read the letter countless times and was gripped by a terrible sadness. He would wait for the phone to ring but it never did.

A while later his roommate gave him a firefly inside an instant coffee jar. It was into the summer holiday, so few people remained in the dorms. The roommate tells him to give it to a girl as girls like those sorts of thing. The Japanese man agrees.

That night, the Japanese man takes the firefly up to the roof. He is not sure if the firefly should be brighter. He questions his memory. He releases it and releases it and it takes a while for it to fly away. But after it is gone, the Japanese man can still see its light and reaches for it in the darkness.