These are stories about people at the breaking point of their own lives, animated with the restraint of someone who trusts you to feel what matters. Each episode is a small perfect wound, the kind only literature can open. You watch a geisha's final night, a man's quiet collapse, a dancer who shows a stranger something true about loneliness. Nothing is explained away. The animation gets out of the way so the human moment can destroy you.

Across 32 episodes, animation brings selected works of modern Japanese literature to the screen. The collection sets out to show a broad audience how varied and distinctive Japanese writing has become over roughly the past hundred years. Its source authors include Higuchi Ichiyou with Takekurabe, Mori Ougai with The Dancing Girl and Natsume Souseki with Botchan. Kawabata Yasunari, winner of the 1968 Nobel Prize, is represented by The Izu Dancer, and Mishima Yukio by The Sound of Waves. The anthology is classed as romance.