Sisters Yoshie and Kikue are two Geisha who are abducted by a mysterious organization to be transformed into murderous cyborg assassins.
A beautiful girl, Yōko, gets lost one night during an air raid and is taken in by an orphanage. Eventually, she is reunited with her own family and goes home to live with them. But there, an unexpected fate awaits her as she is subjected to horrific brutality from these people who are tortured by a past mistake.
The film depicts carnivalesque atmosphere summed up by the cry "Ei ja nai ka" ("Why not?") in Japan in 1867 and 1868 in the days leading to the Meiji Restoration. It examines the effects of the political and social upheaval of the time, and culminates in a revelrous march on the Tokyo Imperial Palace, which turns into a massacre. Characteristically, Imamura focuses not on the leaders of the country, but on characters in the lower classes and on the fringes of society.
