Yoshida’s first big-budget production and colour film is a haunting tale of unrequited love and postwar disillusion. The story of the fatal attraction between a spineless intellectual and a strong woman is conventional, but its enactment is radically new.
This drama of middle-class life in postwar Japan tells the story lower-middle-class workers in the city of Kawasaki, and their troubles and travails.
大石久子は昭和3年、新任教師として瀬戸内海にある小豆島の分校に赴任した。久子が受け持つことになった一年生は十二人で、みな澄んだ瞳をしていた。やがて久子は本校へ転任することになった。しかし貧しい村の教え子たちは、一人として望み通り進学することができなかった。戦争をはさんで島の分校に戻った久子は、そこでかつての教え子たちと再会する。
Emi Ota and her friend Okiku stay briefly at a mountain inn and then return to Tokyo. Later, Nanmura, a soldier on leave, steps on an ornamental hairpin in the public bath at the inn. Emi writes to the inn saying she has lost a hairpin and, when she discovers that it injured Nanmura, returns to apologize. The longer term visitors at the inn meet together to discuss the hairpin incident. These include a grumpy Professor, a young couple Mr and Mrs Hiroyasu, and an old man staying with his two grandsons. They hope to see a romance blossom between Nanmura and Emi, after Nanmura declares that there is something almost poetic in finding a hairpin in the bath.
