It is a warring period in feudal Japan. The warlord, Nobunaga Oda, is rapidly vanquishing his foes on a quest to pacify and unify the country under his rule. However, there is one domain that he forbids to lay a hand on, that of the Iga ninja, whom even the great Nobunaga fears most. The Iga are known to wield extraordinary and supernatural powers as invincible weapons of war who will assassinate anyone for money, and money only. They don’t think of people as human and are dubbed “the killer clan”. But there is one Iga ninja, Mumon, who while peerless in ability is indolent and taken to task for an inability to earn much of an income. In the fall of the year Tensho 7, Nobunaga’s second son, Nobukatsu Oda, decides to ignore his father’s orders and attack the Iga country, partly encouraged by Taizen Heki, a man who had once turned on his master and was now employed as a vassal of Nobukatsu. Heibe Shimoyama, whose brother had been killed by Mumon also seeks revenge on the 12 Iga ninja core, including Sandayu Momoji and Kai Shimoyama. Amid various colliding interests and schemes, ultimately, a major bloody showdown is coming between Oda’s army and the Iga ninja.

The male-female reversal of fortunes all began here… in the Edo period under the rule of third-generation Tokugawa shogun, Iemitsu. An epidemic illness affecting only men and boys has thinned the male population to one-quarter that of females. Iemitsu himself falls ill and succumbs to the plague, sparking a crisis of succession within the Tokugawa family. This prompts head lady of the court, Kasuga-no-Tsubone, to find a born-out-of-wedlock daughter of Iemitsu, disguise her as a boy and secretly groom her in the palace’s inner palace as Iemitsu. When she turns 16, Kasuga-no-Tsubone coerces the handsome Buddhist priest, Arikoto, visiting from Kyoto to serve the girl heir Iemitsu as her page. Arikoto ends up unable to resist Kasuga-no-Tusbone’s pressure and laicizes himself and his young pupil, Gyoku, to enter into the service of the inner palace. The result is a female shogun and 3,000 handsome male attendants, all entwined in the intrigue, jealousies and pure love drama of Edo castle.

It is 1853. Atsuko, adopted daughter of Shimazu Nariakira of the Satsuma clan and known to history as “Atsu-hime”, is en route by palanquin from her home to the castle of the Shogun in distant Edo. She is not happy with this, however, and resolves to struggle against her fate. In the mountains of Hakone she runs from her procession. Her governess Tae and the woman ninja Mitsu chase after her. Continuing on in spite of their entreaties to come back, she looks up as the weird light of a meteor envelops them. The next thing she knows, she has gone 160 years into the future…

The Edo Period, the world of the samurai. The youth Narimichi, the son of a Shogun, who has thus always lived a very restricted life, and the wild girl Yu, spirited away from her mountain village as a baby and raised living free in the mountains. These two, whose circumstances are such that they should never meet, come together before the miraculous ‘lightning tree’, and embark upon a doomed love affair. Knowing they will never be together, they seek all the more to go deep into each other’s hearts. Since neither has ever been in love before, their encounter with it brings spiritual growth. For those of the modern age, far more free than that in which Narimichi and Yu lived, the film will express the value and wonder of love from the heart, without fear of being hurt. This is the story of a miracle of love, between two people who should never have met.