The film's story is told in a series of flashbacks. In the opening scenes, Iwao Enokizu, is a prisoner of the police. A huge crowd of journalists and an angry mob greet him as he enters a cell. The police quiz him but he refuses to answer. The story goes back to the initial murders. Enokizu tricks and then kills two men and steals a large sum of money. He puts on a suit and disappears. Enokizu travels to another city. At the train station, he asks a taxi driver to take him to an inn where he can get a prostitute. Enokizu is sexually insatiable. He tells the innkeeper, a woman called Haru, that he is a professor at Kyoto University. The police, searching for Enokizu, put out bulletins with his face on television. The prostitute thinks the professor is Enokizu, but she is told not to go to the police because of her job. Enokizu's background is as the son of a Catholic father who lost his fishing boats to the Japanese navy in the 1930s. Enokizu is a rebellious, violent child. As a young man, he is convicted and imprisoned. His mother is ill. His wife is attracted to his father. She divorces Enokizu, but then is persuaded by Enokizu's father to remarry him, due to the father's Catholic beliefs. After the remarriage, she tries to seduce the father, but fails. Enokizu accuses her of sleeping with his father when he was in prison. Enokizu travels to Tokyo. He tricks the mother of a young defendant into giving him the bail money for her son. Escaping, he befriends a lawyer who lives alone. He kills the lawyer and uses his apartment. He sends some money to Haru, and travels back to her place. Haru's mother is a convicted murderer who has recently been released from prison. Haru had lost her job, and had to run the seedy inn because she could not find other work. Haru and her mother realise that "the Professor" is the wanted man. Enokizu kills both Haru and her mother and pawns their goods. A prostitute sees the pawnbroker going to the inn and decides to go to the police. Five years later, Enokizu has been executed. His father and wife go to the top of a mountain to scatter his ashes. They throw the bones into the air but the bones remain hanging in the air.
Jasper Sharp says "Both seducing and repelling with its unusual story and grisly humour, Imamura uncovers a seedy underbelly of civilised Japanese society." Roger Ebert says "This portrait of a cold-blooded serial killer suggests a cruel force without motivation, inspiration, grievance."
