Based on true events, the movie is adapted from the 1988 Nesting Duck Child Abandonment Incident in Japan, which tells the story of a single-parent family in Tokyo, where four underage siblings were abandoned by their mother.
The 14-year-old eldest son and his three younger siblings (aged 7, 3 and 2) were abandoned by their mother and lived in the house for eight months. The mother only sent very little money for the first three months, and then never sent any money again; the youngest daughter died in an accident, and the eldest son and his friend put the body in a suitcase and took it by train to the field for burial. The landlord, having not received rent for most of the year, calls the police, who enter the house and find only children living there, and send the children to a children’s home that night, where the youngest, a 3-year-old, is severely malnourished and sent to the hospital for treatment.
The mother was arrested, and because she vowed to take good care of the children, the court lightly sentenced her to probation. The eldest son, though guilty of body abandonment, was sent to a correctional facility instead of a juvenile detention center due to a special exception.
2004 / Japan / Drama / Hirokazu Yae / Yutaka Yanagi Kitaura Ai
The family in the newly moved apartment is a mother, Keiko (You) with four children: Akira (Yutaka Yanagi), Kyoko, Shigeru and Yuki.
However, the mother has to lie to the people around her that her husband has gone overseas to work and she lives with her eldest son.
The truth is that the other three siblings are “black children” because the four children have different fathers.
They stayed at home and did not go to school.
When their mother went to work in a department store, the young Akira took over parental duties at home.
Suddenly one day their mother disappeared, leaving her children with the only 200,000 yen in cash she had and a short note, and leaving her younger siblings in Akira’s care, she quietly ran away from home.
It was not easy for the four children, who had no relatives and knew almost nothing about the outside world, to start facing a new life ……
