After six years without contact, a young man returns to New Zealand and attempts to reconnect with family and friends who have moved on and a country he longer recognizes, but he is forced to confront the failures of his past, as a headstrong idealist trapped in a floundering relationship, and as a Japanese exile infatuated with the wrong woman. From the high-achieving daughter of Chinese immigrants, a Japanese misfit who rubs everyone the wrong way, and an old friend embroiled in a Maori land occupation, this satirical and darkly humorous vel chronicles bigotry, love and the fragility of truth in New Zealand and Japan at the close of the twentieth century.