I dunno, people always talk about it being confusing or hard to follow, but I've never really thought that? Ultimately, there are three major groups of characters: the Colonel and the weird old psychic kids, the lady that Kaneda is kinda in love with and her terrorist friends who are trying to help the one old kid get away from the government, and the biker gang that Tetsuo and Kaneda belong to [although only those two are really that important]. The conflict between the former two drags in the biker gang, owing to Tetsuo having latent psychic powers, as well. Tetsuo's powers eventually go out of control because they're too strong, and because he resists being controlled by the others. Then everything really goes crazy when Akira, the big bad psychic man, gets woken up. But he's mostly cool with just undoing the damage that's been done and then taking Tetsuo off to another plane of existence where he can't cause anymore harm.
