Kanji Watanabe is a middle-aged man who has worked in the same monotonous bureaucratic position for decades. Learning he has cancer, he starts to look for the meaning of his life.

Nijima, a white-collar worker, finds the man responsible for his young daughter's murder. He tortures and interrogates the man, who maintains his innocence, before killing and burying him. He returns to his ordinary life feeling listless and hollow, until he encounters a man that introduces himself as an old friend. The man offers Nijima a new job, and subsequently introduces Nijima to his band of hired killers.

In this gentle comedy, an unpopular resident in a Russian village has his life completely changed when he announces, entirely on a whim and just to upset things a bit, that he's moving to the Pacific coast.