First, the ghost cliché. Sagami, the security guard at a business building, is scared: an office door opens and closes on its own, and the sound of typewriters can be heard in the hollow darkness. The cliché that looms over the building precedes the plot: a fortune hunter, the dashing young Kuramoto, has gained the trust of the company’s CEO, Yukawa, and between flattery and sycophancy, he rises higher and higher. His success is crowned with luck when Midori, the daughter of the firm’s president, falls in love with him. This ruins the discreet womaniser’s idyll with more than one woman, especially Etsuko Nishino, who, to make matters worse, is pregnant with Kuramoto’s child.

The whole story is about the different opportunities that slip through his fingers to murder Etsuko, who threatens to cause a scandal by revealing his affair with the company’s star executive. Finally, he gets hold of the plans for the company building and analyses the sluices and cisterns connected to the drainage tunnels and lifts. He makes up his mind. He calls the future mother, who the day before had Midori call him to say that she was cancelling her engagement to his father. He hangs up, pretending to call Midori and his father. He deceives her as if he had cancelled everything to make her happy and the next day, as I just said, he calls her from the office to meet her at 8:30 p.m., strangles her in the lift and drags her body to the ducts he had previously checked on the map, where he leaves the body. As the days pass, Midori begins to have headaches and tells her lying husband that she had a dream that she was trapped in the lift. Kuramoto begins to drink and cannot control his insomnia or alcoholism.

Etsuko’s brother investigates the disappearance of the building’s typist, and the husband’s hallucinations and visions begin to force him to drink more until, upset, he leaves the house and crashes his car. He doesn’t break any bones or anything and is cared for by his wife Midori, but on stormy nights, the electrical service continues to malfunction and he continues to see visions.

This continues until, returning from a few days away from Tokyo, another subordinate tells him that Etsuko called him on the phone while he was travelling with his wife. ‘So there’s no problem and we know she’s not missing,’ he said. Kuramoto is urged to lower the cistern and check what has happened to Etsuko’s body. He does so and only sees her shoes and moves something that looks like a body. When he climbs back up, he runs into the brother, with whom he struggles after shouting, ‘I know you killed my sister.’ The air that only occurs in bad films pushes Kuramoto through the tunnel in free fall.