A man must choose every day whether he dons a particular colored mask, in turn determining the person he will be. On the first day, he chooses a yellow mask and finds himself the husband of a wife wearing a pink mask with flowered lips that he admires. The wife scolds him for failing to bring back the Queen’s honey from the market and when he tries to seduce her, she stabs him multiple times.

The next morning, he finds the yellow mask gone and instead chooses one the color of sapphires. He lays in bed next to someone he calls a girlfriend and says that he will never marry. His girlfriend convinces him to go into an expensive store despite his protesting that they can’t afford anything in it. There, he runs into a shopkeeper who says that he was the girl who sold him honey yesterday in the market, revealing the taboo reality of each day’s changing personas. The man reflects that if he had been wearing the tan mask he would have punched the shopkeeper in his gut.

In the third morning, the queen sends a letter requesting that the man don the black mask that day. The man dances with the queen, who asks if he dislikes a particular mask and he replies no, which pleases her.

On the fourth day, he wears an orange mask and finds himself imprisoned with a cellmate wearing a ginger mask, and they are both tortured. On the fifth day, he chooses a dark velvet mask and finds himself in conversation with a lover, asking her to marry him. She tells him the only thing that will convince her is a jar of the queen’s honey. When he supplies a jar of the honey, she issues him an ultimatum and says that if he can control his desires, he can have her. Instead, he is distracted by the advances of another woman and chases her throughout the town and when he catches her she rips off his mask, stealing his identity. She then places a white mask on him, which strips him of any assigned persona. The girl, who introduces herself as Pena, asks him to consider who he is without a mask. She takes him underground to a group of liberated people and explains how they make their own masks without identity-changing properties.

The man discovers from the underground revolutionaries that all citizens are descendants of the queen. Directly after this revelation, Pena is discovered and slain. After Pena’s death, the man returns to his masks and destroys them one by one and then goes on to rip the mask off of his former lover and kill her in the same way Pena was killed.