Tokyo is a humming backdrop to an array of outsiders: a young woman arrives in Japan to work as a stripper, the manager of a love hotel has a sleazy plan, a ghost wanders Harajuku, and a woman returns to New Zealand on the saddest journey of her life. Meanwhile, expats trip on mushrooms in Bali, love blooms and sours on Auckland's wild west coast, and workers at a peep show have a brush with a serial killer. The Japanese secular city of salarymen, sex workers and schoolgirls is juxtaposed with the New Zealand setting of rongoā healers, lone men and rural matriarchs. Linked through recurring characters and themes of identity: expat versus indigenous, gender, mother/maiden/crone, these haunting stories from the margins of Japan and New Zealand explore teen suicide, relationships, romantic disappointment, the male gaze, a world of hostessing and exotic dancing, and hedonism of the expat bubble.