This novel follows a young man living on a farm in Miyagi Prefecture as he carries the memory of confinement he endured as a boy and lives through days stagnant like a marsh. It vividly portrays the confinement of rural life and the moment when long-suppressed violence erupts.

Frustration stagnates at the bottom of a marsh, then violence erupts, illuminating the lives of oppressed young people.

In Chennai, South India, a Japanese-language teacher sets out on a short journey across a river swollen by a once-in-a-century flood. Along the way, the narrator encounters surreal events bound up with mud and memory in this story of foreign everyday life and loss.

The mud of a hundred years had swallowed everything.