An ex-professor lives alone in a glorified container in an unpopulated island. He is blind, with only empty beaches and an extensive, carefully curated, shell collection to keep him company. He appears perfectly content in his isolation until, one day, a woman washes up on his beach; a washed out painter with a maimed hand and nothing left to live for. As she takes up residence in his container and starts making room for herself in his life, the shell collector grows ever more protective of his quiet existence. While she is offended by his comfort with isolation, he looks down on her emotional neediness.

When the poison from a rare shell mysteriously cures the woman of her ailments, leaving her spiritually and creatively reborn, it seems that the shell collector has inadvertently stumbled on the cure for an untreatable disease slowly sweeping across Japan. As his beach becomes an unlikely refuge for a community of infected people looking for hope, and his idealistic, altruistic son shows up to help them, the shell collector's quiet existence comes to a forcible end and he is drawn to consider the causes that led to his isolation.

The Shell Collector is a meditative, simple film with no tidy resolutions or simple answers. Things unfold from scene to scene with thoughtful reflection, quietly surreal visions and flowing tangents of consciousness. Director and writer Yoshifumi Tsubota (working from Anthony Doerr's short story) seems as fascinated by the details and mysteries of his characters as those of the ocean and the universe, without feeling the need to explain them. As with the perfect, ancient spirals found in many shells, our narrator tells us early on that we can study and study all we like, but we'll never understand. All we can do is marvel at the mystery.

This film is screening as part of Japan Cuts, which runs from July 14-24 at Japan Society.