It is the 1960s and the Nedokoro brothers have long-since left their family home in a remote forested valley on Shikoku, in the south of Japan: Mitsusaburo for Tokyo to work as a translator and English professor; his younger brother Takashi for the United States, to atone for his part in anti-American student protests. Takashi's return to Japan coincides with a local Korean supermarket magnate's offer to buy the brothers' ancestral storehouse, pitting Mitsusaburo and Takashi against one another and dredging up family histories perhaps best forgotten.

Oe's dark masterpiece of family psychology is the most important Japanese novel of the post-war period and a strange, unsettling tale of how the call of blood and history echoes down the generations.