Based on a true story of the 1980s, the action centers on Asia-traveling Japanese artist "Tez" Nishijima and his Europhile sister Kaoru. When Tez is arrested in Bali on charges of heroin trafficking and faces the death penalty, his parents are paralyzed with shame, leaving his Paris-based sister to come to the rescue. She enlists the help of an old expert on Indonesia and two of his friends, and sets off to face a shadowy and alien situation. Her brother, languishing in jail, thinks back over his journeys in Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, to the two women who changed his life there, to his subsequent slow spiral into drug addiction, and to the day a police stooge planted heroin in his room in the Kuta Beach "backpack territory" of Bali.