Shizuku has a strong taste for the different, the fantastic. She finds her home life, crowded into an apartment with her parents and older sister, just a bit too ordinary and stifling. She reads fantasy books voraciously.

She is also translating the John Denver song, "Country Road," for some fellow students. This song opens the movie and provides it with a recurring theme. City girl Shizuku finds the concept of an "old home town in the country" different, alien, and hard to understand.

One day, an unusual cat captures Shizuku's attention. She follows it down some back roads and finds an odd antique shop. She befriends the owner. Some of the beautiful objects in the shop, and the stories of love they seem to tell, move her (and the audience) deeply.

About this time, Shizuku meets the boy who seems fated to be the love of her life, the boy whose name she saw on many library sign-out cards, having borrowed the same fantasy books as her. But Shizuku is shocked and humbled to find he has already chosen and started on his life's work.

Shizuku is moved to challenge herself and write a fantasy story. This takes a lot of her energy, hurts her grades at this critical time, and causes friction with her family, who haven't been told the nature of her project. But she learns and grows from the experience.

The audience sees beautifully animated, breathtaking scenes from her story. In one, Shizuku soars through the air, surrounded by planetoids that seem composed of semiprecious stones.