A girl with a curl on her forehead chases ghosts and history through a town that doesn't know it's already haunted by its own past. The movie moves like memory itself, unhurried and exact, refusing to explain the magic until you've already believed in it. What hits is how small a life can be and still contain everything: one child, one summer, one curl, one thousand years pressing down from above.

Shinko is a nine-year-old third-grader with an odd curl of hair on her forehead, which she calls her "Mai Mai." In 1955 she lives in Kokuga, a town in Yamaguchi Prefecture that was an ancient provincial capital a thousand years earlier, where ruins and old place names still recall the Heian Period. Shinko comes from a long-established local family and loves playing outdoors, but her secret pleasure is daydreaming about that ancient world, even imagining a friendship with a girl who lived there. When Kiiko, a shy transfer student from Tokyo, joins her class and has trouble settling in, the two girls slowly become close friends. Before long they find themselves caught up in a strange event rooted in the town's distant past. The film adapts a novel by Takagi Nobuko and celebrates friendship and the imagination that links children across the centuries.