Kazama Tsuneo is an immigration officer in Portland, Oregon, whose job is to catch and evict illegal immigrants to the US, often his own countrymen. Frustrated and repelled by what his life has become he is haunted by the sense that his life is a lie, and by an event that happened eight years previously, the reality of which he is unable to confront. Beset by strange passions and emotional fits, Tsuneo's life rapidly disintegrates, a fate compounded by the mysterious woman's voice that Yamada introduces midway into the novel, a voice that speaks of Tsuneo's fears - about his worth, sexuality and identity. Imbued with a beautiful and melancholy sense of longing, the story becomes a quest narrative in which Tsuneo desperately chases this woman, and the mystery of what happened eight years earlier.