刑满释放的洪忠都（薛景求饰）出狱后，家人对他横加排斥，而他之所以被判入狱，只是为了顶替哥哥的罪名。之后心冷意凉的他，来到车祸死者的住所拜访家属，遇到死者的女儿韩恭洙（文素利饰）——一名重度脑麻痹患者，面容扭曲、手脚抽搐。但忠都却被她吸引，并在冲动下做出大胆之举。但在意外事件后，两人彼此都萌生了情感思念，孤独的心灵就此渐渐靠拢。他们看似身心不甚健全的非正常人，却遭遇着赤裸裸的现实不公。不过，命运并没有就此放过戏弄他们的机会。

Korean workers in Japan constituted imperial Japan's largest colonial labour force in the 1920s and 1930s. Caught between the Scylla of agricultural destitution in Korea and the Charybdis of industrial depression in Japan, migrant Korean peasants arrived on Japanese soil amid extreme forms of precariousness in the labour and housing markets. For the migrant, becoming a worker in Japan was dependent on chance, on knowing or meeting the right people, on being in the right place at the right time. In "The Proletarian Gamble", Ken C. Kawashima maintains that contingent labour is a defining characteristic of capitalist commodity economies. He develops his argument by scrutinizing how the labour power of Korean workers in Japan was commodified, how they fought against the racist and contingent conditions of exchange, and how they combated institutionalized racism. Kawashima draws on previously unseen archival materials from interwar Japan as he describes how Korean migrants struggled against various recruitment practices, unfair and discriminatory wages, sudden firings, racist housing practices, and excessive bureaucratic red-tape. Demonstrating that there was no single Korean 'minority', he reveals how Koreans exploited fellow Koreans and how the stratification of their communities worked to the advantage of state and capital. However, Kawashima also describes how when migrant workers did organize, as when they became involved in Roso (the largest Korean communist labour union in Japan), and in Zenkyo (the Japanese communist labour union), their diverse struggles were united toward a common goal. In "The Proletarian Gamble", his analysis of the Korean migrant workers' experiences opens into a much broader re-thinking of the fundamental nature of capitalist commodity economies and the analytical categories of the proletariat, surplus populations, commodification, and state power.