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It is 1964 and Misako Imai is a young Tokyo housewife
with a secret. When she was a child living in her grandfather’s
dark, wartime Buddhist temple in the northern prefecture of Niigata,
she became aware of a special sensitivity that allowed her to see
visions of things that were currently happening………but
in another place……or that had happened in the past.
Steeped in the mystery of burning incense and
daily chants for the war dead, the impressionable young child developed
a highly sensitive nature that at times crossed the line into the
world of the paranormal. When the distraught little girl told her
mother that she had seen her soldier father lying bloody and dead
in a far-off jungle, the shocked family dealt severely with her
presumed lying. The child quickly learned that she must suppress
anything that made her different from her family or her peers.
Now, after five years of marriage and no children, Misako is living
the life of a full-time maid to her husband’s widowed mother,
who blames her for not producing a son to carry on the family name.
One evening, she has the very clear vision of her husband making
love to another woman and realizes that he has taken a mistress.
This cuts Misako deeply as she is part of the post-war generation
of young Japanese who were smitten with the western idea of romantic
love. Misako had fought her traditional family to be allowed to
marry for love. She had actually walked down the isle of a Christian
church in a white dress and veil. Now she wondered whatever happened
to the promised happy-ever-after.
Her marital problems unresolved, Misako is summoned
by her grandfather to Niigata when his temple receives the ashes
of a young girl’s bones that were found in a nearby garden
pond. The old priest remembers his granddaughter playing in that
garden as a child and telling him that she saw a girl fall into
the pond. At that time there had been no evidence the sighting was
anything more than the child’s over-active imagination. But,
after meeting a most unusual Zen priest who tells him about something
called clairvoyance, he realizes that his own granddaughter may
have had such a gift when she was a child. The old priest becomes
obsessed with the possible connection between the bones found in
the pond and Misako’s childhood vision. Feeling that he can
give into a bit of fool-hardiness in his old age, he plans an unorthodox
memorial service in the garden where the bones were found and arranges
for both the Zen priest and his granddaughter to attend. What he
does not realize is that the combination of the two priests’
limited knowledge and his granddaughter’s powerful sensitivity
would be a dangerous combination bound to end in disaster.
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