Juliana Crain is a
San Francisco woman whose half-sister Trudy has just been killed almost in front of her by the
Kempeitai going to arrest her. Just before she dies, she hands Juliana a film reel that contains a series of faux news clips that depict an alternate history in which the
Allies won
World War II and Germany and Japan were defeated. The film is entitled
The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, and is part of a series of similar newsreels said to have been created by someone referred to as "The Man in the High Castle". Juliana believes the newsreel reflects some sort of alternate reality, and that it is part of some kind of larger truth about how the world should be; her boyfriend, Frank Frink (who keeps his Jewish roots hidden in order to avoid extradition and death at the hands of the Nazis), believes that the news reel was created entirely from the imagination of The Man in the High Castle for his own reasons, and has no relation to real-life events. Juliana learns Trudy was carrying the film to
Canon City,
Colorado, in the Rocky Mountain States, where she was going to meet someone. Juliana decides to travel there in Trudy's place, to find out what her half-sister's mission was. When she arrives in Canon City, she encounters Joe Blake.
Joe Blake is a 27-year-old
New Yorker who seeks out the resistance in order to volunteer to help them, purportedly as an effort to continue his patriotic father's legacy. However, he is secretly a double agent working for the Nazis. At the instigation of the resistance, he agrees to drive a truck full of "coffee-makers" to Canon City from New York, where he will make contact with another resistance member. In Canon City, he discovers what the truck he is driving conceals—a copy of
The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Later, he enters a diner and befriends Juliana Crain, who has been waiting there in hopes of meeting with the person set to meet with Trudy. Meanwhile, in New York, the resistance men Joe Blake met with are seized and tortured to death by the Nazis, headed by
Obergruppenführer John Smith. Though the resistance members do not talk, the Nazis already know that the truck dispatched by the resistance is going to Canon City, and why, which hints that it might be a trap.
Nobusuke Tagomi is a high-ranking Japanese official in San Francisco. He meets in secret with Nazi official Rudolph Wegener, who is traveling incognito as
Swedish businessman Victore Baynes. Tagomi and Wegener are concerned about the power vacuum that will open up when the Reich's Führer
Adolf Hitler dies or is forced to step down due to his worsening
Parkinson's disease. Wegener explains that Hitler's successor will want to use the Reich's nuclear bombs against Japan in order to gain control over the rest of the former U
