A nineteenth-century drifter returns from Japan to learn that his tuberculosis has left him “weeks, months, but not years.” He embarks on a philosophical inquiry of death as he journeys on the historic overland route from New York to the Rocky Mountains. A devilish samurai mask, a cursed revolver, and his ‘romantic disease’ propel him on a Herculean adventure into the Wild West, where he hopes to subdue his fate. But the lessons he learns turn his struggles inside out when he realizes a life without end would become as desolate as a place with no summer.