When Q arrives at the island to take up his position as instructor at H reformatory, he finds things strange and puzzling. One can do anything or nothing. The instructors, who are not expected to instruct, occupy themselves in various ways. Q's room-mate, the crab-shaped theologian, preaches doom and destruction and indulges in a kind of self-flagellation; the literary man is writing an experimental novel which Q, who has never read a novel of any kind, finds shocking; a former electrical engineer has invented a game of pure probability which the instructors are compelled to play daily and which Q has a dread of winning, for the prize is the rector's wife. And then, there is something unusual about what they eat. As a secret member of the Sumiyakist Party, Q is on a mission to incite the inmates of the reformatory into revolution against their oppressors. But who are the oppressors? The overseer? Though he has a lot to say, he has no authority. The rector, so huge that his body seems ready to engulf the world? He spends his time eating, wallowing in a vast bath, or being shaved all over by his unsmiling nurse. Perhaps the one-eyed Doktor, who performs an "operation" on all newcomers? A revolution eventually takes place, but not as the Candide-like Q has planned, nor is the outcome of it what his sumiyakist doctrine had led him to expect. But then, nothing is quite what it seems in this unusual science fiction novel, in which conflicting philosophies and attitudes to life and death, freedom, equality, morality, literature, existence are held up against an eerie, dreamlike background. Fantasy, political satire, burlesque—the novel reflects a bizarre image of the human condition.