The movie is a free interpretation of the story of the notorious Danish “angel maker” Dagmar Overbye, who murdered dozens of infants in Copenhagen in the 1910s and was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1921.
The 1973 novel was written by Kobo Abe and follows a nameless man who gives up his identity to live with a large cardboard box over his head, encountering a range of characters as he wanders the streets of Tokyo。