Mr. Ueno, retired, lives alone; he talks to Maria, a maid-droid his parents brought from their factory decades ago. Maria became Ueno's companion after his parents' deaths, and now her battery is run down; there are no replacement parts. Meanwhile, Inspector Akagi and her police squad are looking for a serial rapist that may not be human; however, if it's a robot, in harming people it would be disobeying Asimov's rules of robotics. Akagi's inquiry takes her to a droid factory run by Mr. X; he...

Abby, four years out of college, an aimless child of privilege, comes to Tokyo to be with her boyfriend, who promptly leaves for Osaka. She wants to stay in Tokyo in hopes he'll come back to her, but she's miserable: she speaks little Japanese and has a dull job as a law-firm gopher. She stumbles into the neighborhood ramen shop operated by the aging master chef Maezumi and his wife Reiko. His soup cheers Abby, so she decides to apprentice herself to him. He's uninterested, she's insistent, so...