A master assassin and a survivor dig into a conspiracy that keeps revealing new layers of rot, and by the time you realize what this show is actually about, revenge has already stopped being the point. The violence isn't there to look cool, it's the language these characters use to ask if they can ever be clean again. You'll watch two people destroy themselves trying to answer that question, and the soundtrack will play something beautiful while they do it.

Usui Yuen is a master assassin who presents himself as a merchant of all trades. As he looks into a string of killings aimed at the powerful Satsuma samurai clan, he meets Kurima Raizo, a clan member who survived one of the attacks. Raizo, a righteous samurai, was deceived into killing the man who was to become his father-in-law, and he vows vengeance on the lord who misled him. Yuen, secretly one of the Revengers, a band of killers who avenge the wronged, helps him in that pursuit. As Raizo works alongside them as a vigilante, the pair find the murders are about more than stolen resources, and a tangle of corrupt Japanese political elites and unscrupulous Europeans comes to light. Raizo begins to see that justice can be as deceptive as the honor he hoped to restore.