The story starts with a serial killer, whose victims are lone women and acts are perpetrated in Mizuno Maki's neighborhood (it is suggested that Motoki is this serial killer). Motoki is a police officer with 2 faces: he has an obsession for housewife Maki and is very gentle with her, and on the other side he rapes & tortures one of her friend, Kanda Uno. His ultimate goal seems to make Maki fall in love with him: so he uses her friend Uno to affect her relationship with her husband & he gradually introduces himself into her life. Another person is also obsessed with Maki (she is a sort of public personality as she runs a cooking club with other housewives and appears in magazines), harassing her all the time on the phone, spying on her, etc...: this person is close to her as he knows things from her past (her son drowned in an accident). Motoki also had an ordeal in his past: his mother was killed in a fire, by her lover.

Five years have passed since Kuryu Kohei's transfer from Tokyo to Ishigaki, and then to Sapporo. He ends up in a small town of Nijigaura in Yamaguchi Prefecture. There, he investigates a murder case involving a local enterprise, Kamoi Group, and the people related to it. Everyone in town thinks he's innocent except Kuryu, whose unorthodox investigation methods perplex not only the townspeople, but his colleagues as well.

After Satoru Watarai graduated from elementary school, he dropped out of school and decided to live within his apartment complex, never to venture outside. Satoru Watari then meets his old friends as they are coming back from their middle school classes. Satoru has now gotten a job at a cake shop within the apartment complex and eventually gets engaged to one of his friends. Satoru, still lives within the apartment complex only, but, as time passes, more of his friends leave...

"Saigo no Yakusoku" is described as a human suspense story involving the hijack of a major building. The members of Arashi play five young men who happen to be inside, and the story depicts their attempt to escape and their interactions with the other people caught up in the incident.

The struggles of a group of outcasts living in "Yentown", in an alternate-future Japan.