A woman from foreign place buries her secrets in smoke and shadows. A girl trussed by routine has trouble seeing herself. A bored man is trying his best to keep himself going.

The film, adapted from the Chung Chao-Cheng novel of the same title, Song of Chatian Mountain, depicts the intellectual tyranny of the occupiers at the end of the Second World War and the way that educated persons resisted the war. A Taiwanese man, Lu Zhixiang, well educated in Japan and a judo master, returns to Taiwan to live up to his high ideals.