The Garden of Words

Takao Akizuki is a fifteen-year-old shoemaker-in-training who skips first-period English every rainy morning and sketches in a corner of the Shinjuku Gyoen garden instead. One of the mornings he is there, a woman in her late twenties — Yukino Yukino — is there too, drinking a beer at nine in the morning and reading no book. They start sharing the gazebo without speaking, then quietly start sharing the gazebo on purpose. Yukino is on indefinite leave from a job she cannot bring herself to discuss. The film is about the few weeks before the rainy season ends and the gazebo stops being a reason.