幼年時代 (Yonenjidai)

He was seven when they sent him to live with another family, though he kept returning to his real home, sometimes twice a day. Then his father died, and his mother was turned out into the world, and the boy never saw her again. What remained was his adoptive sister, bound to him not by blood but by something more fragile and precious: the tenderness of two children navigating loss together. When she too was married away to some distant place, he learned what it means to lose everyone you love before you are grown. Murō Saisei transforms his own childhood into something achingly universal: a quiet, devastating meditation on the bonds that sustain us and the absences that define us. This is childhood remembered with unsentimental precision, where every visit to the house by the river carries the weight of knowing it cannot last.