When Junpei was sixteen, his father imparted the following wisdom on him: of all the women he will meet in his life, there will only be three that have real meaning to him. He advised him not to waste his time on women that don’t bring meaning to his life. Junpei wondered if his father had met his three women yet and who they were, besides his mother. 

At eighteen, Junpei left for college in Tokyo where he met two women, one of which still holds meaning to him today. She married his best friend and became a mother. After her, he asked himself if every woman he met matched up to her and he was afraid of using up his chances at true love. So, after a month with a woman, he would find something that irked him about her and push her away completely and he continued to dip in and out of relationships this way. After college, he and his father got into a big argument and they stopped speaking, but he still held on to his three-woman theory. 

The next meaningful woman was an older woman named Kirie who he met in a bar. She was drawn to his artistic aura as an author and they talked about his literary fiction. She made him use his artistic observation skills to guess her occupation, but he fails to and she keeps it a secret. At the end of the night, she slept over at his apartment and when Junpei woke up the next morning she was gone and had left a note with her phone number. The next night, the same thing happened, and he wondered what work she did to make her get up so early on a Sunday. She told him she had read his books and liked them, and he was relieved. She told him she enjoyed how balanced his writing is as a Libra. She told him he would be a great novelist, but he expressed his uncertainty and said he’s a short story writer. 

One day in autumn as they lay next to each other in bed, she asked him if it was true that he loved another woman, and he admitted it. He said that he’s unable to see her but doesn’t elaborate. Kirie told Junpei she doesn’t want a serious relationship with him because it might distract her from her profession. He guessed again what her occupation was, but she refused to tell him and instead asked him about his upcoming work. He told her it was a story in the third person about a skilled female doctor who’s having an affair with a doctor at the same hospital. He said that the character will go on a vacation alone at a hot-spring resort where she will notice a kidney-shaped stone in a nearby stream. She will bring the stone back with her to the hospital to use as a paperweight on her desk, but after a few days will notice that she finds the stone in a different place every day. 

When Kirie asked for the ending, he said he didn’t know it yet and in his sleep that night the ending began to come together. For the next five days, he didn’t leave his house and he wrote at his desk. The character discovers the kidney stone one day in the body of her lover and she comes to accept its constantly changing position in her office. She becomes completely entranced by it and loses interest in the books and activities she used to love. When he wrote this character, Junpei thought of Kirie and sensed that, like the character, she was also propelled by something internally. He imagined that the character in the story would soon grow tired of her lover. He wrote the two characters’ break-up scene, in which the woman broke up with her lover and threw the kidney stone overboard on a Tokyo harbor ferry. 

When he finished, he’d tried to call Kirie, but the call did not go through and he stopped hearing from her. He felt more pain than he’d anticipated at their separation and he wondered if she had been his second woman. The next spring, he heard her voice on the radio being interviewed. She was talking about how she’d left a job as an analyst at a securities firm to clean skyscraper windows because she loved heights. When asked if she liked mountain climbing, she replied that she didn’t have an interest in mountains and only gets excitement out of scaling man-made structures. She said that she also enjoys tightrope walking and is sponsored to put on shows in which she balances from tall heights. 

At the end of the interview, Junpei stopped the taxi and walked the rest of the way, looking up at the tall buildings around him. He waited a few months longer for her to contact before accepting that they were over. During the next six months, he wrote a large number of short stories and wondered where she was. At the end of the year, he decided she was his second woman and that he only had one more chance, even though he knew his father’s theory was unfounded. He understood finally that he needed to accept someone fully as themselves in order for it to work out.