Plot
Michiko Akiyama (Kinuyo Tanaka) is married to Tadao Akiyama (Masayuki Mori), a college professor, a vulgar man with a low-class background. Towards the end of World War II, they flee the Bombing of Tokyo to her parent’s estate in Musashino, a pastoral location in the outskirts of Tokyo. Nearby is her cousin, Eiji Ono (So Yamamura), a wartime profiteer with loose morals, and his wife Tomiko (Yukiko Todoroki). After the end of the war, the extended family is joined by Shinzaburo Miyaji (Eitaro Shindo), another cousin and former prisoner-of-war.
In the immediate post-war era, Japanese traditions and morals are in rapid decline. Tadao comes home drunk every night, and is having sex with his female university students. He also propositions Tomiko. Tomiko, unhappy in her marriage, lusts after Tsutomu, but Shinzaburo is more interested in Michiko. Although Michiko has suppressed feelings for Shinzaburo, she resists his advances on traditional moral grounds – because she is a married woman, and because she does not want Tsutomu to fall prey to the new permissiveness of post-war Japan. However, when she learns of Tadao’s plans to run off with Tomiko after swindling her out of her inheritance, she decides that the only honorable course of action is to commit suicide, and leave her estate to Shinzaburo.
Read more about this topic: The Lady Of Musashino
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickens ... with the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)