A man loses his sight as a child and finds his entire world in a single instrument. The shamisen becomes his only language, his way of speaking when silence would have swallowed him whole. Nitaboh doesn't make disability into inspiration porn or tragedy, it makes it into a path, one note at a time, until a blind kid rewrites an entire musical tradition with his hands.
A childhood illness steals Nitaroh's sight, but leaves him with his mother's shamisen. A blind shamisen player who travels from place to place teaches him the fundamentals of the instrument. Over the years, with support from longtime companions and new friends alike, Nitaroh follows the road that will make him the originator of the Tsugaru school of shamisen playing. The film is a music drama about the beginnings of that style.
