After almost twenty years in business, the historic water laundry in Lecce's San Pio district closed down. Before it, the same fate had befallen other businesses. It is the phenomenon of gentrification; some places, even the most unlikely streets and buildings, end up changing their physiognomy without a valid explanation as to why.

Jim and Connie's postwar New York building troubles keep Jim from working on his novel. Ex-WAC from Jim's army days Roberta moves in, further upsetting Connie but pleasing Jim's friend Ed. Tenant Charley, who marries tenant Eadie, loans money to Jim to help him keep the building, money which this Casanova obtains from rich widows.

During the late 1980s, two detectives in a South Korean province attempt to solve the nation's first series of rape-and-murder cases.

In the years before World War II, a penniless Japanese child is torn from her family to work as a maid in a geisha house.

A Chicago journalist suffering from memory loss takes leaves from his job and returns to his rural hometown, where he bonds with his Alzheimer's impaired uncle Rollie and his old flame.

Serial killer Dennis Nilsen narrates his life and horrific crimes via a series of chilling audiotapes recorded from his jail cell.