Stay Mum

Writer Chisako Satoya returns to her hometown, compelled to care for her estranged father, Kozo, now grappling with dementia. Their long-standing feud hangs unspoken in the air of his solitary house. While navigating the fragile rituals of caregiving, Chisako uncovers her father's unfinished manuscript—a story that eerily mirrors their own fractured relationship. Each page she turns becomes a fragment of a past he can no longer articulate and she has never fully confronted. Between administering medication and preparing meals, she descends into the narrative he left behind, where the lines between his fiction, her memory, and their shared truth blur into an unsettling mystery.