magazine that Miyazawa started with his friends. Toshi starts to cough violently and Kenji rushes to her aid. In 1923 Kenji moves to Tokyo out of depression, working at a small publishing out. He meets his friend Kanai again after three years, but Kanai now believes Kenji to be too idealistic, and says that they cannot walk the path they dreamed of together after all. Kenji returns shortly afterwards to Hanamaki to be with Toshi, who is very sick and talks about her fear of death. Kenji reads her a story of his and describes his writing methods and the inspiration he takes from nature. His creative process is depicted in an abstract sequence showing birds, bears, a winged Kenji, and numerous other images in varying art styles. Kenji's father berates him for printing so many copies of his book, which no one ended up reading. Kenji declares that he doesn't write to sell books. In the classroom his students read his poetry collection Spring and Asura, but they all profess to not understand it. Kenji observes the farmers toiling slavishly in the fields and becomes overcome with emotion, hit with a sudden hallucination of being trapped and surrounded by water filled with skeletal corpses and fearful spirits. He comes to with his students worrying around him. They then tell him about a student who has been stealing from his classmates; Kenji catches the student and tells the boy to follow him, travelling a long way through difficult natural terrain until they reach a mountaintop. There Kenji asks the boy about his motives for stealing, offering selflessly to give the boy his entire salary and to get him however much money he needs. He learns that the young boy is from a poor family of farmers. Kenji makes up his mind to quit teaching and to work the fields alongside the other farmers. He is unused to the work, and the other farmers scoff at him and view him as a weak amateur. As a sung version of Miyazawa's famous poem Ame ni mo Makezu plays in the background, Kenji works in the field in the day and teaches the farmers about art and literature as well as new fertilizing techniques during the evening. However, many other farmers still do not warm up to him, continuing to think of him as spoiled and rich, even sabotaging his crop while he