A woman who, disguised as a beggar, turns out to be a formidable assassin, is charged by a warden to infiltrate a women's prison, to run the one that took his eye with a wooden spoon carved from a knife - a woman named Nami Matsushima, known within the walls under the nickname of Scorpion.
Set in the Taisho era, which might be regarded as Japan's Hippie Phase, Hana no ran is a story about fashionable people without impulse control. Much of the action centers on a popular woman writer, the real-life poet Akiko Yosano, and her experiences among the literati of early 20th century Japan. Because of her independent, anti-war and often erotic poetry, she was a lightning rod for revolutionaries and other extremists, many of whom were destined to glamorous, yet ultimately pointless, deaths. The closest parallels might be the Byron/Shelley group or the people drawn to the Beat Generation.