The film crosses between dreamlike and highly stylized realism. The film opens in the traditional bunraku doll theater and then cross-cuts between three modern love-tragedies - a daring tragic triptych on the nature of unrequited love and abandonment - which span the four seasons and cover much of Japan. While paying homage to the art form, Kitano effectively creates the exact reverse of bunraku: a selection of human emotional disasters as a
