Kinuyo Tanaka and Hiroko Kawasaki are the daughters of Viscount Tatsuo Saitô. He is a liberal and allows the girls to have their own ways, although he wants them to get married -- unsurprisingly to a pair of well-connected boring guys in the Diplomatic service. But they meet and fall in love with two upper-middle class guys, Miss Tanaka with Shûji Sano, who is an executive in a manufacturing firm, and Miss Kawasaki with Shin Saburi, an artist who is going to Paris to study. When Sano's mother finds Miss Tanaka has been visiting her son while she is away, she assumes she is some lower-class girl and snubs her, to Sano's amusement and despair. Miss Tanaka discovers she has fallen pregnant by Shûji Sano and that he is dead in a glider crash. There is an understandable furor, both in her family, and with Sano's mother, until Uehara, Sano's brother, proposes to marry her. In the meantime, Miss Kawasaki is urged to marry. Will Saburi return from Paris in time to save her?
The movie that makes up the second half of the story begun in Shindo: Zempen Akemi no maki -- it was released less than a week later -- is a meditation on the compromises that Japanese society imposes on women. With its excellent cast, it remains continually watchable, although ultimately depressing.
The movie that makes up the second half of the story begun in Shindo: Zempen Akemi no maki -- it was released less than a week later -- is a meditation on the compromises that Japanese society imposes on women. With its excellent cast, it remains continually watchable, although ultimately depressing.
