On a stormy night, Kaori drives home from her aunt's funeral with her drunken husband asleep beside her. She hits an old woman standing in the road with persimmons in her hands, and she drives away. Pregnant at the time, she gives birth in prison. On the day she is released, her husband arrives with divorce papers and a cruel question: which is more miserable, being the child of a criminal or the child of a dead mother?

Kaori decides that the kindest thing she can do for her son is to become a "dead mother." Her two attempts to see him end in scenes and arrests. She leaves Chiba and spends 17 years drifting west through inn kitchens, factories and pachinko parlors, each move taking her further from him. She works only to keep up the life insurance policy she has bought in his name. In Fukuoka, at the far
western end of her journey, she finds friendship for the first time. Then her ex-husband appears with news that her son now knows she is alive, and with a slip of the tongue that overturns what she has believed about that rainy night for 17 years.

Narrated in the first person and spanning 17 years in twelve chapters, the novel takes its title from a Japanese expression for patiently waiting for the right moment, as a persimmon ripens and falls on its own. It is a quiet, slow-building story about guilt, motherhood and second chances, and about a woman who could not wait, and what time alone can do. Japanese readers describe a heavy first
half that gives way to a deeply moving, redemptive ending.