Although they've met only once, at a train station in Japan, Elaine Chieko Packard and Connor McKenzie have been haunted ever since by passionate dreams they cannot control. They determine to resolve the tension between the moral strictures of their religion and their own overpowering emotions by eloping, a decision that triggers an entirely unexpected series of events.

In the days and months that follow, they find themselves reliving, in both dreams and reality, many of the same conflicts their parents and grandparents once did. They won't be able to move forward with their lives until they have addressed the unsettled obligations of the past, "turning the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers."