In a strange seaside city on the verge of revolution, a young man made of paper climbs out of a crashed bus and into his new life. He is called Michael, and since the procedure that transformed him from a regular boy into one made of paper, he has been living the isolated existence of a freak inside his family's Inland home. Escape is Michael's only hope, and the City offers art, adventure and possibility for everyone, even somebody as strange and different as Michael.

Things take a surprising turn when Michael's cruel high school sweetheart Mischa suddenly reappears in his life, the only person who remembers him as a normal boy. Torn by his friendship to Maiko, the woman who saved him from dissolving in a sudden rain storm after he first arrived in the City, and Mischa's decadent art world, Michael follows his impulses. But it is the artist David Doppelmann that ultimately captures Michael's heart, and as he strives for more from his new life in the anarchic city, the paper man begins another dangerous transformation, one that will either lead to his resurrection as a human being, or destroy him and everyone he cares about.