A single father, Otsuka, Hisashi Igawa escapes a grinding mining camp and steps into the quiet, uncertain countryside. From a nearby cemetery, a mysterious man in a white suit, Kunie Tanaka whose identity remains hidden, trains his camera on them, capturing the moment as dusk gathers. As they plan to board a bus the next morning, the unemployed miner clings to a hopeful dream of union solidarity, imagining what it would be like if he were reborn into a life dedicated to organizing workers within the mines.
They reach a boardinghouse and are sent toward a Kyūshū village in search of work, with Otsuka’s young son beside him—Kazuo Miyahara stepping into the role of the boy who walks alongside a father trying to keep faith in the promise of better days. Soon the road leads them to a ghost town, deserted save for a lone female shopkeeper who keeps watch over a place emptied by time. She, Sumie Sasaki, explains that the mine closed after a cave-in, and the men drifted away in the wake of the disaster. After she points them in the right direction, the miner presses on, only to be shadowed again by the same man in white, who brutally murders him and hurls the knife into the riverbank.
The killer returns to the ghost town, where he finds the shopkeeper and bribes her to frame Otsuka—the union leader who bears an uncanny resemblance to the miner—for the crime. Meanwhile, the miner’s ghost wanders the town, unseen by the living, a quiet echo of a life extinguished. Detectives later locate the corpse and study the knife wound, discovering a photograph tucked in the back pocket that bears a striking resemblance to Otsuka. It becomes clear that a faction within the labor movement has splintered, forming a second union at another pit, a split that Otsuka himself tries to explain.
Desperation drives Otsuka to contact Toyama, the old-pit union leader, Sen Yano, pleading his innocence and asking to help locate the shopkeeper. But the shopkeeper herself is killed by the man in white, and as Otsuka and Toyama learn of this murder, they blame one another and engage in a fatal confrontation that ends both men’s lives. The man in white watches with a cold satisfaction, mounts his motorcycle, and rides away, his mission seemingly complete. In the final image, the miner’s son, who witnessed everything, leaves the village and runs off toward the horizon, carrying the weight of what he’s seen into an uncertain future.
