In the summer of 2006, Yoshiko Kayama returns to her childhood home before setting out on a journey of her own. She finds her grandfather gravely ill — and, almost by accident, opens a store of memories he has kept sealed for decades. In the amber light of the attic they look through photographs of war, images that stay with her. In the 1930s he worked in China as a battlefield photographer. After Japan's surrender he came home and said almost nothing about what the camera had seen. Talking with him, Yoshiko begins to understand that some facts of that war are remembered, and told, very differently in China.