In the buildup to World War II, Ono, a promising artist, breaks away from the teaching of his master, whose artistic aim was to reach an aesthetic ideal in representations of the 'floating world' of night-time entertainments. Ono becomes involved in far-right politics, and begins making propagandistic art. Later, as a member of the Cultural Committee of the Interior Department and official adviser to the Committee of Unpatriotic Activities, Ono becomes a police informer, taking an active part in an ideological witch hunt against a former student, Kuroda. After the 1945 defeat and the collapse of Imperial Japan, Ono becomes a discredited figure, one of the "traitors" who "led the country astray"; meanwhile, the victims of state repression, including people Ono himself had once denounced, are reinstated and allowed to lead a normal life. Over the course of the novel Ono seems to show a growing acknowledgement of his past "errors", although this acknowledgement is never explicitly stated, and his narration is marked by declarations of uncertainty in his memory of past events and a high degree of unreliability.
The book is written in the first person and hinges on the exclusive use of a single, unreliable narrator, expressing a viewpoint which the reader identifies as limited and fallible, without any other voice or point of view acting as a test. Ono often makes it clear that he is not sure of the accuracy of his narrative, but this may either make the reader cautious or, on the contrary, suggest that Ono is very honest and, therefore, trustworthy.
The self-image Ono expresses in his narrative is vastly different from the image of him the reader builds from reading the same narrative. Ono often quotes others as expressing admiration and indebtedness to him. Ono's narrative is characterised by denial, so that his interests and his hierarchy of values are at odds with the reader's. Readers, therefore, find that what they are interested in is not the focus of Ono's narrative but at its fringes, presented in an oblique rather than direct fashion. For example, Ono's descriptions of his pictures focus on pictorial technique, mentioning the subjects as if they were unimportant, although they reveal the propagandistic nature of his work. It is not entirely clear whether this focus on style rather than substance should be ascribed to Ono as narrator (showing his retrospective, unconscious embarrassment), or if it was already present in him at the time he was making the pictures (showing that totalitarianism exploits people's capacity to restrain their awareness to limited aspects of their actions). Similarly, when Ono narrates an episode in which he was confronted with the results of his activities as a police informer, it is debatable whether his attempt to mitigate the brutality of the police is a retrospective fabrication devised to avoid his own responsibility, or whether he actually did disapprove of the treatment of the person he had denounced, distancing himself from his actions and refusing to recognise the abusive treatment as a direct and foreseeable consequence of those actions.
