Suzu, a young housewife in wartime Kure, has her right hand and her young niece Harumi killed when a delayed-action bomb explodes while they are out walking during an air raid. She survives, grieving and feeling responsible, and must relearn ordinary tasks like cooking and drawing with her left hand while her family continues the daily routine of rationing and shelter-digging.
The book depicts war not through battles but through the erosion of domestic ordinariness: stretching rations, foraging weeds, mending clothes, and queuing persist right up to and past catastrophe. It argues that daily life does not pause for history; people keep cooking and cleaning even as the structures around them collapse.
History is viewed from the periphery, through one unremarkable woman in a port town, rather than from leaders, soldiers, or the bomb's epicenter. Seen this way, a world-historical atrocity registers primarily as the loss of specific small things: a hand, a niece, a familiar street, a way of drawing.
Suzu copes by habitually sketching and aestheticizing her surroundings, a gentle imaginative drift that doubles as a way of not fully confronting grief. The book presents this capacity to find small beauty as both a genuine resilience and a form of emotional absence that she must eventually relinquish to feel her losses.