Yûzô Kayama loses control of his car when a tire blows and kills Yôko Tsukasa's husband. Although a court finds him not guilty, he insists on paying her 15,000 yen a month; his company transfers him to a rural branch.
Meanwhile, Miss Tsukasa is angry about her husband's death, angry that his family wants to remove her name from the family register so they can collect his death benefits, humiliated that she must accept this blood money. When her brother's widow invites her to move back to the family inn, she accepts, and refuses any further from Mr. Kayama. Her sister-in-law's married lover wants her to become the mistress of a business associate to further his prosperity; and the branch of the company that Mr. Kayama has been transferred to uses that very inn to entertain clients.
Mikio Naruse's last movie is about the plight of a woman in modern Japan, trapped between her own desires and emotions and public expectations. It differs from the stereotyped idea of his movies in that Kayama is not a villain, not even unthinkingly so. He is as trapped by the terrible accident as she is, caught by his own sense of right and wrong. He wants to do right by this woman he has wronged. He wants to get out of the small hick town. He wants.... well, he wants what he cannot have.
Naruse and his crew indicate the dullness and repression of modern Japanese society by, among other choices, using a repressed color palette. Almost everyone dresses in greys and tans, and the first flash of red isn't seen until almost half an hour has passed.
