Based on the life of the Korean anarchist Park Yeol, the film shows his struggle to counter the massacre of Koreans by the government during the 1923 great Kanto earthquake, focusing on his activities as the leader of the anti-Japanese organization Bulryeongsa and his relationship with Japanese comrade Fumiko Kaneko.
A Japanese tent theatre company tours from Tokyo to Melbourne and performs a play about the ghost of Kamikaze Pilots. Cambis has created a portal from this to the cinema screen that shows first hand the actor's art in the context of war.
When poverty-stricken Korean-Japanese (Zainichi) discover there is valuable iron ore in the rubble of a destroyed shantytown they plan to haul it out for profit. Amidst this plan there is discrimination, war and an infatuation between a man and a woman, but like everything around them there and owing to the forces around them, there is as much chance that these may burn to ashes and be destroyed or be the beginning of something new.
A couple years have passed, Matsuzaki is divorced and has a daughter and is still up to his old compulsive gambling, boozing and womanizing even as he stares middle age in the face. At his daughter's school he meets a teacher who's similarily obsessed with horserace betting and who's also frigid - something he does his best to therapize. He also reconnects with his ex-wife, who just so happens to be the literary agent and love interest of another writer of the gambling genre. An epic gambling battle between the two ensues.