Paul is agonising over his interpretation of 'Uncle Vanya' and, paralysed by anxiety, stumbles upon a solution via a New Yorker article about a high-tech company promising to alleviate suffering by extracting souls. He enlists their services—only to discover that his soul is the shape and size of a chickpea.

By following the lives of five Japanese individuals this documentary explores the problem of depression in Japan and how the marketing of anti-depressant drugs has changed the way the Japanese view depression. Marketing of anti-depressants did not begin in Japan until the late 1990s and prior to this, depression was not widely recognized as a problem by the Japanese public. Since then, use of anti-depressants has sky-rocketed and use of the Japanese word "utsu" to describe depression has become commonplace, having previously been used only by psychiatric professionals.

When cloth merchant Zhao Dexin passed through the ancient tomb, he met the scholar Qin Qiufan and the girl Hua Hongyu in the underworld. Qiufan was killed by robbers on the way to Beijing, and his body was thrown into Hongyu's cemetery. Wang Jinqing, the nephew of Hongyu's stepmother, once forced Hongyu to marry him. Hongyu could not bear the coercion and hanged herself. Later, Wang Jinqing was killed for taking someone else's wife, and he still did not let Hongyu go in the underworld. Qiufan and Hongyu loved each other, but they could not get married in the underworld because there was no evidence of their marriage in the world.