1968. Two former lovers meet outside Japan, their country of origin, ten years after they have ended their relationship, and together they travel to Germany in what is not known if it is a parenthesis in their respective existential drifts or a way to regain lost links and find some key that reveals something about themselves and the shared past.

He, a reporter-writer who has witnessed chaos and war abroad, is a sort of Oblomov, of a Sleeping Man, devoted to indolence, immobility and pleasure. He leads a lethargic, foggy life; the days follow one another in a wait without an object, forming a confusing and gray landscape, in which it goes off with indifference.

She, after a long journey that has taken her to work as a typist, sell cigarettes in a cabaret, reject a marriage proposal of a young English nuclear physicist and overcome an affair with an American linguist of Germanic origin, is about to get her PhD at a prestigious German university and thus undertake his dream of developing an academic career in the West, far from the worries and contempt he lived in Japan.

And at that point on the road they meet again, ten years older: disoriented, uprooted, helpless. During a hot summer of sex and vital darkness - she trying to reconcile with the culture of the native country, from which she fled; he, traversed by uneasiness and entropy, being reduced to an almost inert mass of dull sensations - will try to reconfigure their relationship and not wreck definitively, looking for some sense that anchors them in a convulsive, dizzying, incomprehensible world.