Yasu, a bit-part actor at a film studio, is made to take in Konatsu, a former actress pregnant with the child of the star actor Gin-chan. Torn between devotion to Gin-chan and love for Konatsu, Yasu throws himself into increasingly dangerous stunt work in one of Kohei Tsuka's defining works.

A bit-part actor's devotion to a star moves toward the stair fall with both comedy and pain.

A wartime novel about Lieutenant Kajii, a Naval Academy graduate whose hopes for front-line combat are cut off as he is moved from an escort vessel to a minelayer and then to minesweeping duty. Through a man who sees his own fate reflected in a weapon that waits silently for an enemy, the novel portrays the sea before and after Japan's defeat and the battles that continued after the war was over.

Sea mines and a young officer searching for a place to die intersect on the quiet battlefield before and after defeat.