Michio Yamada, Daijirô Harada, is a recent graduate from a small town in Hokkaido who is swept into a government program that sends him to Tokyo to work as a fruit packer in a department store. The job is unstable from the start: one participant after another quits, and Yamada soon follows suit. He drifts through a string of dead-end gigs, even getting caught while secretly trying to board a ship to the United States, and facing rejection when he volunteers for military service. The city feels like an unfamiliar maze, and his restless energy grows more dangerous as he eventually steals a gun from an American base and uses it to kill two guardsmen, a brutal act that marks a turning point in his life.
Midway through the film, a stark flashback plunges us into Yamada’s childhood. He is the seventh of eight children in a household led by a submissive mother and an irresponsible father. The memories are harrowing: as a boy, he is forced to witness the rape of his older sister, an event that leaves her traumatized and institutionalized. Two other sisters suffer greatly as they struggle to feed the younger ones, painting a picture of poverty and neglect that helps frame Yamada’s later impulses and sense of power in a world that seems forever out of reach.
Back in the present, Yamada’s restlessness erupts in more reckless choices. He murders two taxi drivers to steal their money, and he pursues a sequence of intimate affairs, beginning with a brief relationship with a young sex worker and then with a girl who frequently visits the night club where he works. When his girlfriend drugs a customer and takes his money, a violent backlash follows: a yakuza gang brutalizes her, and Yamada responds with a forceful confrontation, beating the gang’s leader with the same cold resolve that has come to define him. A failed burglary further unsettles his already fragile grip on reality, and the story culminates in Yamada’s arrest, a grim consequence that brings his turbulent arc full circle.
The film maintains a restrained, observational tone, letting the rawness of Yamada’s choices—the escalation from petty defiance to outright violence—speak for itself. It juxtaposes harsh, gritty realism with long, contemplative pauses that dwell on the consequences of a life spent teetering on the edge of society. Themes of alienation, family trauma, and the corrosive lure of quick money and quick power intertwine as Yamada’s past and present collide, exposing how a person shaped by neglect and desperation can drift from hopeful beginnings into a perilous path that seems to offer control, even as it leads toward ruin.
