In a faceless apartment in Tatekawa, Tokyo, an american woman hires a Japanese woman to translate interviews about Japan’s declining birthrate. The American woman is presumptuous in her knowledge of Japan; the Japanese woman suffers from a self-professed excess of critical distance. They grate, fight, and crash together in love or lust, at which point their story gets hijacked into science fiction territory, as the translator interrupts their work sessions with stories from a world infected with the knowledge of its own demise. The third protagonist is the Tatekawa itself, a canal covered by an elevated highway, which gives the neighborhood its name and runs past the translator’s apartment.