Welcome-Home Meals
at Nightlight

Synopsis

There's no place anymore for an outdated old guy.

Amane Kashiwagi, forty-two, is let go from the warehouse where he worked for years, with a single sentence. No prospects for a new job, the lowest day of his life. That day, Amane finally opens the box of keepsakes left behind by Tomi Yoshinaga, the old woman who once saved him.

Her letter says: "You don't have to be perfect anymore. Become just a 'middle-aged guy who's good at cooking,' one who lights up the nights of girls who've been hurt." Wiping away his tears and making up his mind, Amane takes the dusty landline at the old Taisho-modern house Tomi left him, Nightlight, a women-only share house, and with his own hands plugs the cord back in. Click.

The women who gather there are all worn out, each for her own reasons. A career woman who collapses in the front hall. A new hire who cries in the office kitchenette. A college girl who can't see her future. A manga artist being slowly killed by deadlines. Wary of him at first, they're won over by a single plate on the very first night, disarmed by Komugi the big dog sleeping belly-up, and before they know it, they're "coming home" to the living room every night.

If they're hungry, he cooks. If something's broken, he fixes it. On sleepless nights, he just listens. That's all. And yet, somehow, his late-night meals are kind enough to bring tears. And every so often, glimpses of something no "mere house manager" could explain slip out of him, as casually as taking out the trash.

"You must have me mixed up with someone else. I'm just the house manager."

This is a place where the food tastes like you don't have to try so hard. A secret shelter for women, where they can say "I'm home." Tonight, too, the lights come on at Nightlight.