Makoto Majima, a cool-headed twenty-year-old who helps out at his mother's fruit shop, is known around Tokyo's Ikebukuro district as the neighborhood's troubleshooter, the one who settles other people's problems by talking rather than fighting. When a girl he has been hanging around with is murdered, Makoto goes from mediator to investigator, calling in Takashi Ando, king of the G-Boys street gang, and working the neighborhood's underside to find out who is responsible.