A lonely kid and an old man with a dead tree. That's all there is, and it breaks you anyway. The cherry tree isn't waiting to bloom; it's just there, and so is Taichi, and so is the old man, and somehow that's enough to make you believe in small things again. Postwar Tokyo has taken everything from him except this one person who knows how to sit with emptiness without trying to fix it. By the end, you understand why a tree that refuses to die matters more than any story about trees that do.

Taichi spends his days alone in postwar Tokyo, his father a casualty of the war and his mother away at work. The boy carries a grief that seems too heavy for his small shoulders, and he badly misses the father he lost. Everything shifts when he befriends an elderly man who looks after a cherry tree that appears to be dead. As their friendship grows, the old man teaches Taichi about the tree, and little by little the lonely boy finds a more hopeful outlook. This single-episode drama special tells a quiet story of loss and gradual healing.