The novel opens with a description of a love story between two students at a boarding school in the U.S. and a country in Japan. The lovers are forbidden to be together at the school because of their love for each other, but they are allowed to kiss their places in the school. They decide to go for a walk together, but the weather is too bad to go out for a stroll. The narrator tells us that he has been looking for the girl, but she has been swept away by the "black doggies" , who call themselves the "white cats" . The two of them decide to picnic together, and the narrator curses the "manical laugh" of the other students.