Nadezhda Stoyanova is a renowned translator from Japanese and a university professor at the peak of her career and experience when she learns that she has a tumor. She finds out together with her daughter Evgenia, a host on the most-watched television channel. Both believe that the illness will be cured and that their lives will not change drastically - Evgenia continues her routine television work, while Nadezhda begins translating what is considered an untranslatable Japanese novel by Nobel laureate Yukio Kobayashi, titled Flesh. But they are both mistaken. Nothing will ever be the same again, because it is precisely the flesh—the inescapable human flesh—that has the final word.