In a gloriously imagined 1920s world inhabited by people who have gramophones for heads, young composer Hero Wasabi has left Japan to study musical composition in Venice, accompanied by his oboe-playing cat Jacuzzi. Hero is a student of the terrifying Madame Zero at the Scuola di Musica, where his fellow students include the aristocratic Count Telefino, an unscrupulous telephone-head who is planning a campaign of dirty tricks to help him win the school's graduation prize, the Abacus Scroll.