In the days the shogun ruled Japan, two hundred samurai suffered a grave insult when their master met an unjust death. Forty-seven of them were courageous enough to avenge him. A lowly servant to one of the brave samurai is Jiro, who calls himself a "fly on the wall." Choosen as his master's unlikely spy during the planning of the great revenge, Jiro must know when to talk and when to listen lest he lose his head to a Samurai testing the sharpness of his sword. As Jiro plays his small partin the plan of the forty-seven samurai, he searches for his own identity in the barbaric society of feudal Japan.