Isamu and Minoru spend most of their free time watching television at the home of a neighborhood couple who have the only television in the community. Their parents refuse to buy them a television and make pejorative references to the waste of time and nonsense on the television; they also disapprove of the character of the neighbors because they suspect that the woman is a professional erotic dancer. The boys plead with their father to buy them a television so they might watch Sumo wrestling and baseball but their parents refuse. In a fit, Minoru argues that the types of conversations that his parents and the other adults share are even sillier than anything the boys want to watch on television and that the adults never talk about anything meaningful. He specifically points to the meaningless gossip and to the disingenuous way that the adults greet one another with a meaningless...

This causes them trouble in school but it also triggers a problem among the adult. When the boys do not respond to Mrs. Haraguchi's morning greetings, she assumes the worst and imagines that her apology has not actually been accepted and that their mother has instructed them to rebuff her.
Perhaps the most illustrative example and metaphor of non-communication is that Mrs. Haraguchi's brother is a professional translator who is unemployed. Despite being a professional communicator by trade, he too is incapable of communicating about anything meaningful. He and Setsuko, the boys' aunt are obviously mutually interested in one another but can never get beyond meaningless superficial conversation, precisely of the type described earlier by Minoru in his tantrum over the television.