Koi no katamichi kippu

Noriko Maki breaks up with her lover on discovering he is married. She stands in the street, crying, until saxophonist Kaazuya Kosaka urges her to come along with her. He is on his way to audition for an agent, and gets the gig in a house band at a night club. Miss Maki is also offered a job, as a nude dancer. Meanwhile, the club is about to star teenage heart-throb sensation, Masaaki Hirao. A love triangle develops and things get really messy when her former lover stalks back into her life.

A Hollywood version would offer the audience beautiful people in beautiful settings with plenty of laughs along the way. Writer-director Masahiro Shinoda does no such thing. The world he sets this in is an ugly one of back alleys filled with trash and garishly lit streets and cluttered theaters filled with idiotic bobbysoxers, or whatever the Japanese equivalent is. No one fights fair for love, or is witty; Miss Maki weeps and yearns for Kosaka, who is too upset with her apparent willingness to exhibit her body that he sulks; Hirao threatens the club's manager with a walkout unless Miss Maki sleeps with him; and her former lover thinks he owns her and all her possessions. Love is not a beautiful thing, but an obsession as ugly as the world it exists in.