In search of a better life, Tomas Rodrigues has rewritten his past with consequences disconcerting to his present. He is at a tipping point, fearful of losing the strands of his own life story. His dreamlike meanderings around Tokyo mirror his unreliable perceptions when he begins to obsessively track a woman who is the doppelganger of his first true love--a romance that ended when she chose to search for her ancestral roots rather than pursue their future. Commissioned by the doctor who treats him after a minor accident, Rodrigues undertakes the translation of a 16th-century Portuguese manuscript only to find it dovetailing with his search for his former lover.