He, Kengo, played very persuasively by Masayuki Mori, is a married man who uses women for what he can get and he uses Yukiko, played very movingly by Hideko Takamine, for occasional distractions and to borrow money from her, but he never cares for her any more than he has cared for any woman. She becomes addicted to him and is always forgiving and is unable to give him up. She understands him well and, very movingly, she smiles as she broaches the topics that must be most hurtful to her and discusses with him his adventures with other women.
Their entanglement continues in an on-and-off way in the devastation of post-war Japan. He is a forester and is unable to find work and she, a secretary, can find no work. Finally she follows him, almost literally, to the end of the earth when he finally finds a job as a forester, and the film ends tragically.
This is a bleak and pessimistic film. The couple are dragged down by their own weaknesses and by the social and economic circumstance of Japan in the post-war period. She is attractive, kind and sympathetic; he is good-looking (a bit like an orientally-inflected Gregory Peck!), uncaring, womanising and self-interested.
Naruse, considered in many quarters as one of the Japanese masters alongside Ozu and Mizoguchi, was at the same studio as Ozu, was promoted more slowly. He has a less idiosyncratic narrative style veering, with its use of background music slightly more to our expectations in viewing a melodrama, but it remains a starkly realist and moving film.
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