The drama describes her trials, tribulations and triumphs at school and some of the lifelong friendships she made there, and her life after graduating and working at a publishing company and as a translator.
As a subplot, it also narrates the dramatic life of Muraoka's old friend, Byakuren Yanagiwara, the tanka poet who was a cousin of Emperor Taishō.
The story begins with Hanako and her children narrowly escaping death during the April 1945 bombing of Tokyo, clutching her precious manuscript.
Born Hana Ando to a small and poor farming family in Yamanashi Prefecture's Kōfu city, she was too busy with household chores to go to school until her Christian father, Kippei Ando, a somewhat educated wandering salesman who married the kind but illiterate Fuji, gave her a picture book when she was seven years old.
Hana continues on to the upper school, and it is at that time she encounters Kayo, her younger sister who had been contracted to a sewing mill, but had fled the miserable conditions.
She helps her get back on her feet, but with little employment for an intelligent, independent woman, Hana leaves Kayo in Tokyo upon graduation and returns to Kōfu to become a teacher at her old primary school.
Her brother Kitchitaro, who himself had fallen in love with Renko when she once visited Kōfu, rebels against his father and decides to leave town and join the Kempeitai, Japan's formidable military police force.
She participates in the publisher's new children's magazine by translating Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper, a book suggested to her by Eiji's younger brother Ikuya.
She visits Tokyo and encourages Hana to pursue her love for Eiji, even as she, feeling trapped in a marriage with a kind but uncultured man, begins an affair with Ryūichi Miyamoto, a law student involved in left-wing theater who happens to be watched by Kichitaro and the Kempeitai.
Hana, however, is shocked to learn that Eiji, despite once hugging her in a fit of emotion, is married to a sick but beautiful woman, Kasumi.
Hana, Eiji, and Ayumu are safe, and Renko is able to flee her family, but Ikuya dies just after proposing marriage to Kayo in the cafe.
Just before the Attack on Pearl Harbor, Miss Scott, her teacher from Shuwa, gives her Anne of Green Gables in hopes Hanako would eventually translate it.
When the Pacific War begins, Hanako quits her radio job as she senses it is no longer about giving children dreams.
Eventually, the bombing reaches Tokyo and Hanako, who decides translating Anne of Green Gables is one way of dealing with this war, barely escapes with her family and manuscript when an air raid nearly destroys their neighborhood.
Renko had lost her beloved son Junpei in the last days of the conflict, and blames Hanako for urging children on the radio to fight for the nation.