Old apartment complexes, rented houses in the suburbs, and cabs running through the cities. These scenes may look ordinary but each has a different story to tell. A daughter who works part-time to support her disabled mother; a woman who has been cut off from her family and continues to work as a cab driver; a granddaughter who lives in a rented house and works at a factory with her grandmother. This is the story of three women, who live far apart from each other and do not know each other's existence until a fateful encounter through a radio program.

Megumi Noda, or "Nodame" is a piano student at Momogaoka College of Music. An extremely talented pianist who wants to be a preschool teacher, she prefers playing by ear rather than reading the music score. She is messy and disorganized. Shinichi Chiaki is Momogaoka's top student. Born into a musical family, he is talented in piano and violin and has secret ambitions to become a conductor. An arrogant multi-lingual perfectionist who once lived abroad in the music capitals of the world as a young boy, he is trapped in Japan because of his childhood phobia of airplanes and the ocean. They meet by accident and sparks fly!