[1] It is about a girl named Umeko Shimomura who, despite being overshadowed by her talented older brother and sister, and despite being thought of as a clumsy child, decides to follow in her father's footsteps and become a doctor.
Almost no one believes she can succeed, but when Takeo suddenly decides to quit his studies and go into business with Yōzō, Kenzo's brother, and when Matsuko finds out her fiance had been killed at the front, Umeko becomes the last chance for a family member to follow in Kenzō's footsteps.
With the help of Nobuo, her next-door neighbor whose father runs a small screw manufacturing shop, she studies furiously and just manages to enter a women's medical school.
At school she meets Toshio Matsuoka, a talented medical student who admires her father but who is so devoted to research he does not know the first thing about dating women.
She begins to respect his selfless dedication to helping those in the neighborhood and decides to leave the hospital to start her own clinic in Kamata, especially after Sakata dies in an accident.
Hiroshi, the orphaned boy she helped save, reappears as a pharmaceutical salesman and tries to convince her to close her clinic and join the hospital.
Kenzō retires from the university hospital, only to take up another position in Chiba Prefecture, and Toshio returns from America, still more concerned with research than women.