This is a film about a Japanese female Noh actor dealing with her struggles in both her personal and professional life, as she learns to find her “self” outside of her mother’s footsteps, in a male-dominated empire of Noh − a traditional performing art with 650 years of history. It was never the plan of Masashi UZAWA − a Noh master, and Hikaru UZAWA’s grandfather - to let Hikaru’s mother Hisa, and later Hikaru, perform on stage as a profession. Hikaru and Hisa are the only mother and daughter pair among the handful of female Noh lead performers, which is known as “shite”, in Japan today. As a pioneer, Hisa has been recognized as a Preserver of Important Intangible Cultural Property (commonly known as Living National Treasure) by the Japanese government. Since Hikaru’s stage debut at the age of 3, she has been promoting the tradition and later performed worldwide. Yet both Hikaru and Hisa have to constantly stay alert and fight in the male-dominated industry. Unlike her mother, Hikaru didn’t get married and gave birth at 30. Her audience is looking for more innovative expressions of art. She intends to advance her career by starting her own theatre company and to be independent of her mother. Like many women at her age, she feels the need to get pregnant for the expectation of her husband’s family, as well as from her mother to sustain the Noh lineage of UZAWA. However, at the age of 40, she is facing a dilemma that pregnancy would delay her career plans. While charting what a woman “shite” can do in the modern world, Hikaru is being constrained by a woman’s role in Japanese society, as a mother, a daughter, and a wife.