A woman was raped in her school years and broke up with her lover because of it. Later, when she became a high school music teacher, she had forbidden liaisons with her colleagues and students at her apartment.
When a dedicated jockey finds that the local politicians are not to be trusted and begins to feel his romance with a beautiful woman slowly slipping away, his last-ditch effort to risk it all for his trusted horse Palomo shows that sometimes animals are truly man's best friend.
When the 'Lowly Ronin' helps an orphaned teenage girl avoid being turned into a prostitute, she then claims he is her father and they start a farm as father and daughter until fate steps in and he must draw his sword.
The story, told partly in flashback to 1968, concerns a clique of English public schoolboys who bully and humiliate an unpopular younger pupil (Cox) who is 'bad at games'.