Hanada Goro (Wild Youth's Jo Shishido), "Number 3 Killer," is hired by gang-boss Yabuhara as escort to a mysterious underworld figure-a mission fraught with dangers-while Yabuhara busies himself with Hanada's wife. Three assassinations later, Hanada would seem to be moving up in the ranks, but when he bungles a fourth because a butterfly settles on his telescopic sight at the crucial moment, he finds that failure cannot be tolerated in the underworld. "This was the film with which Seijun Suzuki finally exasperated the production system at Nikkatsu: an absurdist thriller that 'de-constructs' the themes and rhetoric of the genre so thoroughly that it ends up resembling Godard's almost contemporary Made in USA... The film is now widely accepted as one of Suzuki's best, a view shared by the present administration of Nikkatsu." (Tony Rayns, Edinburgh Film Festival '88)