Oboroyo no onna

Toshiko Iizuka begins an affair with Shin Tokudaiji. When she falls pregnant, he offers to declare her his wife, but she says she can manage on her own, rather than blighting his life before he begins it. She does fall in with a plan for Tokudaji's uncle, Takeshi Sakamoto, to pretend to be her lover, and for him and his wife to adopt 'his' child.

In the Western world, this story would be told from Miss Iizuka's viewpoint, and she would be the central character. Here, however, the film concentrates more on the warm relationship between uncle and nephew, and it is more than half an hour into the film before Miss Iizuka appears.

Heinosuke Gosho was not the only director to make films whose point-of-view was someone outside the center of the events; Mikio Naruse's SOUND OF THE MOUNTAIN did much the same, although the movie concerned itself with the impact of events on the protagonist. Despite that, this movie does not offer any sense of the impact of events. That may, however, be the point of the movie; Miss Iikuza suffers, Mitsuko Yoshikawa as Sakamoto's wife is aggrieved, and the men get off scot-free.