Newly married and having recently taken over the management of a hotel in Honolulu, a former writer is drawn into the lives of his guests and the distinctive customs and rhythms of the distant island. As witness to the many contrasting chronicles of the hotel's characters, he ultimately returns to writing once again. The result is this novel in eighty distinct episodes, a Chaucerian sequence of strange pilgrims and islanders confronting each other and their fate, in the rooms of the seedy hotel.