Nobody Knows is about a 12 year old boy named Akira. He is the eldest of four children. He lives with his mother, brother, and sisters in an apartment in Tokyo, Japan.

The Family

The story starts when Akira and his mother are moving in to their new apartment. They are carrying two heavy suitcases up the stairs. They stop by their landlords apartment and talk to him for a while. Akira’s mother said that it was just him and her staying in the apartment, and that Akira’s father was working abroad.  The landlord asked for Akira’s age because young children are not aloud. Since Akira is 12 he is aloud, but the land lord said that children any younger are not aloud. Since he is the eldest, none of his brothers or sisters are aloud.

The family is of two girls and two boys. Akira,12. Kyoko, 10. Shigeru, 8. and Yuki,6.

Once Akira and his mother get into their apartment they opened up the suitcases and then Akira’s younger brother, Shigeru, and sister,Yuki, came out. Then they had to sneak up his other younger sister Keoko,11.

His mother always comes home late, but she starts to come home later and later. Then one day she doesn’t come home. She left a note and a small amount of money to pay for things. After a few months she returned.

Akiras mother told Akira that she had a new boyfriend and once they got married they could all live a normal life. She then leaves again promising to be back for Christmas. But she did not keep her promise. Akira and Keoko have to play the role of the parents on Christmas. She did not keep her promise. On Christmas Akira and  Keoko had to be the parents. They gave the little ones some money .

Soon Akira found out that she had already gotten married and had left them there to fend for themselves forever, but he did not tell the others this.

Akira soon becomes friends with two video-game loving boys who are his age. They frequently come to Akira’s house to play video games, and Akira starts to not pay as much attention to his siblings. Their ties become strained. Later, the two boys bring Akira to the mini-mart and dare him to shoplift. Akira refuses to do so and the two boys leave him. After that, Akira lets his siblings go outside and play at a park nearby. He also lets them visit the mini-mart and buy things they like.

As winter turns to spring, the bills have piled up and the electric, gas, and phone have all been turned off. They have to make use of the local park’s public toilet to wash themselves, and the tap for their water. It is on one of these trips that Shigeru starts a conversation with a high school student, Saki, and this soon blossoms into a friendship between all of them. Saki frequently visits them and helps take care of them. However, when she offers to earn money to give to them by visiting a Karaoke lounge with a man, Akira distances himself from her, rejects the money she offers, and runs home.

Summer approaches, and money remains very tight. Suddenly, Yuki falls off a stool while trying to reach for something and dies. At that time, Akira was playing baseball. The children are shocked, and Akira has to go find Saki to borrow money. Akira uses this money to buy a lot of chocolate candies, and places it into the suitcase with Yuki’s dead body and favorite stuffed bunny. Akira and Saki then take the Tokyo Monorail to an open field near Haneda Airport’s runway and bury the suitcase containing Yuki in a hand-dug grave. The children’s lives go on but not the same as with Yuki.