This one gets under your ribs by refusing to raise its voice. It starts on an ordinary walk to junior high, the moment the narrator's maternal instinct switches on uninvited, and then it just sits with that for ten years, turning the feeling over like a stone. Virgin birth, genes, pregnancy: the film treats them less as topics than as suspects, interrogating whether the urge was ever really about motherhood at all. It's a Geidai short, so there's no spectacle to hide behind, just a voice thinking out loud and images built to keep pace with it, which is exactly why some viewers bail in the first few minutes and others never shake it. The people who love it love it because it names something they'd carried around for years without a word for it.

A girl on her way to junior high school is suddenly struck by maternal instincts, and the urge holds her captive for the next ten years. As the decade wears on, she starts to doubt whether what she feels really has anything to do with motherliness. Her search for an answer takes in virgin birth, genes and pregnancy as she moves across that decade looking for the maternal. The film is a psychological slice-of-life work, mixing inner questioning with the ordinary course of a life.