Tony Takitani (Issei Ogata) is a successful illustrator prized for his minutely accurate renderings of machinery. He lives a highly controlled life, so involved in his work--a form of artistic practice that seems to provide some of the psychological benefits of occupational therapy--that he doesn't really notice he's lonely. (He sees his father, a jazz trombonist who survived imprisonment in China during World War II, every few years.) One day Eiko (Rie Miyazawa), a polite, well-dressed young woman, comes to pick up finished work for a client, and Tony, taken with her sense of style, starts dating her. Tony proposes marriage, which she accepts after he talks her into jilting her fiancé.

But there's trouble ahead: on their first date Tony compliments Eiko on the way she inhabits her clothes, and she tells him that she loves clothes because they seem to fill an emptiness inside. The story that follows is a trim (75 minutes) allegorical romance of temptation. Tony has composed a tranquil but somehow not fully satisfying life for himself; he chooses Eiko to complete that life despite the fact that she herself tells him of the void that will eventually make their marriage impossible. Heedlessly drawn to Eiko nevertheless, Tony takes a step onto spiritually hollow ground and falls through, and keeps on falling. That's what this kind of ironic protagonist does, from Adam on down through the susceptible men played by Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel (1930), Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity (1944), Pierre Blanchar in La Symphonie pastorale (1946), Laurence Olivier in Carrie (1952), Masayuki Mori in Ugetsu (1953), Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris (1972), and Woody Harrelson in Palmetto (1998). (These fallen characters land near, on, or over the border between irony and tragedy.)

At the same time, Tony Takitani is an unusual allegory about a man who loses his head for a woman because Tony doesn't lose it in the usual way--Eiko's allure for him is aesthetic rather than sexual. Tony, who spends his days hunched over detailed drawings of inanimate objects, sometimes wearing a surgeon's mask as he airbrushes, represents the urge to shape your life, to make it into an unsurprising, graceful thing. The narrative is constructed to show that when such a character exposes himself to wider experience, his carefulness will prove to have left him totally unprepared for the messiness he encounters, in this case Eiko's compulsive urges and his own unresolvable reactions to them. And his equilibrium can't be restored, even after the cause of all the messiness is gone.