The story is told from the perspective of Kitsune, a young Japanese woman who, along with twenty other Japanese women, is becoming a reeler:

[s]ome kind of hybrid creature, part kaiko, silkworm caterpillar, and part human female. Some of the older worker’s faces are already quite covered with a coarse white fur, but my face and thighs stayed smooth for twenty days. In fact I’ve only just now begun to grow the white hair on my belly(24).

The women live in a place they’ve named “Nowhere Mill,” a single room with one window that’s too high for anyone to look out of. On one side of the room are the dirty mats the girls sleep on and in the middle of the room is “the Machine,” a device that quickly pulls the silk from each girl. Many of the girls were brought here against their will, their lives signed over to the Recruitment Agent in exchange for five yen. The Recruitment Agent says that the girls will be reeling silk for the empire, but he never says the truth about what ultimately happens to the girls. Once the girls are alone with the Recruitment Agent, he forces them to drink an orange tea that makes them pass out and ultimately transforms them into silkworm creatures that produce large quantities of silk—Japan’s main trading commodity.