The novel opens in a restaurant in Yokohama, Japan, where the protagonist is having lunch with his friend, Yuuko furuta. The two of them have known each other since middle school, and they have been best friends ever since. The protagonist tells Yuuko that he has to stand on his own two feet now, since he has no place to live. He tells her that if she lets him think that she has moved in with him, she will not have a home to call her own. He says that if he lets her think that he is moving in with someone else, he will not be able to live in the house he has always dreamed of. He adds that he used to live his own life, but things have returned to normal now, and he is ready to start his life again. He sees that Yuuko is wearing a non-alcoholic dress, so he throws on some bottoms and says that he knows what she is wearing. He thinks that she must have bought the beer from a mistake, but she says that she does not want to let the beer go to waste. He asks her if she has had any romance, and she replies that she did not leave her house for anything other than work for a month, but that she had cried out to him all day. She also said that she worked in a magazine for a while, too, and that she was a flapper, too. He wonders if she lived in the bubble economy, as she had said, and wonders why she gave him such a job. She replies that he gave her the job because he honked his horn, but he says she would not have helped him in such a way. She says that there is only one medicine to break a broken heart, and this is a month before she is to move on.