Quietly confident and a keen observer of others, 21-year-old Shogo Hatano has just reached the final interview stage for a graduate job at Japan’s hottest new tech company: Spiralinks. The firm has narrowed down 5,000 applicants to just six final candidates. The last stage requires the six of them to work together in a 2.5-hour group discussion about a typical case for the firm. Shogo’s teammates include: Sota Kuga, a natural leader with movie-star good looks; Ryo Hakamada, a lively baseball player with a talent for putting the room at ease; Shima Iori, a pretty and highly insightful sociology student; Yashiro Tsubasa, a wealthy, well-travelled international relations student; and Kimihiko Morikubo, a quiet, industrious student who’s a year older than the others. Spiralinks claims that they will hire all six students if they can form the best team possible, so the group decides to meet twice a week for a month and throw themselves into getting to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Just as the group is really starting to bond, Spiralinks drops a bombshell: only one of them will be hired. Worse still, the new topic of the group discussion: the six of them must agree on a single candidate to be hired by Spiralinks before the 2.5 hours are up.

Things take an even more extreme turn when the day of the group discussion finally arrives. Within the first five minutes, the group notices a package in the conference room containing six envelopes, one addressed to each of them, to be opened in a specific order. The envelopes contain controversial information about each person and the group immediately realises that the package must have been compiled by one of them to discredit the others and get the job at Spiralinks. This person becomes known as “the culprit”. Any trust that the six of them may have had in one another has been decimated, and now the revelations about their private lives start coming thick and fast. With the clock ticking, the group decides to take a vote every 30 minutes on who they think should get the role. As they simultaneously try to process one another’s scandals and figure out the identity of the culprit, they each have to push their strategies to the absolute limit if they still want to be in with a chance of winning…

Eight years later, an unknown narrator is conducting interviews with those who were present that day. These flash-forwards are interspersed with the scenes in the conference room where the tension shifts with each new round of votes. It gradually becomes clear which of the students didn’t get the role and why, but as the competition narrows and the stakes become higher yet again, everything is not quite as it seems. Somebody has confessed, but why does it seem like they might not be the real culprit? And after all these years, can anyone really be sure that the job went to the right person? No one can afford to lose in the relentlessly cut-throat world of corporate Japan, but in the pursuit of victory they risk revealing some of the darkest sides of human nature.