Sent to an institution for mentally handicapped children by his parents, he began creating artworks using torn strips of paper. After running away to avoid army conscription, he began his wanderings around Japan, encountering many scenes which he would recreate as torn paper art from his amazing photographic memory.
A young woman breaks off her long-term relationship with her boyfriend to move to Tokyo in search of new experiences.
A young Japanese man finds himself in the company of a strange, effeminate gay man and a girl with a seedy sexual history and who even now is pregnant again. They share a predisposition for drug use and spend time together in an old house. He refuses the advances of the gay man, who then commits suicide. When a gang administers a beating to him, his father re-enters the scene and takes him home, along with the girl. However, the girl has decided to have her baby, and she goes to live with its father.
Shinta is a sixth grader in Kawasaki City a troublemaker that dreams to become a soccer player. Yoshiko, a classmate who moved to Kawasaki from Iwate Prefecture two years ago, is a gloomy girl who suffers from asthma due to the polluted air in Kawasaki and is ostracized by her class. Shinta is placed next to Yoshiko in class and their stories will take a turn.
Two rival groups of gangsters vie for control of a tiny port town in northern Japan. Daisuke, a member of the older of the two gangs, and Kosuke, a hoodlum in the newer gang, both fall in love with the daughter of an inn proprietor, even though she evinces more interest in improving the town than in their romantic advances. Eventually, the two hoodlums come to respect her efforts and decide to join forces in ridding the town of all gangsters. The two men succeed in restoring peace to the town and, rejected by the innkeeper's daughter, they leave town as friends.