The gap between who your mother is and who you wish she'd be is the cruelest distance in the world. This movie lives in that space, never choosing sides, never letting you laugh without feeling something underneath it. Nikuko is loud and messy and loves the wrong men, and her daughter hates her for it, and the movie understands both of them completely without needing to fix either one.

Nikuko is loud, bold and cheerful, always ready for something delicious, and she falls hard for the wrong men. Her motto is that ordinary is best of all. After years of drifting from town to town and man to man, she has settled on a houseboat docked at the port of a small northern town, where locals know her as the happy woman at the grill. She shares that boat with her eleven-year-old daughter Kikuko, a quiet, reserved girl on the edge of puberty who is often embarrassed by her mother's antics. The two seem to have little in common beyond their home on the water. As Kikuko faces school drama and tries to figure out her odd classmate Ninomiya, a secret between mother and daughter comes to light. The result is a warm comedy drama about an unconventional family.