This is so unbearably bad at face value, it gets you thinking. It has to be a sort of exercise, a put-on. It simply cannot be what appears to be.
The plot is about the scion of a wealthy family who wants to pursue his heart outside of social decree, and efforts of his father to steer him back into responsibility and ethos. It is a typical plot for Naruse, except here strangely trivialized, treated as a petulant game of feelings.
The easy thing to note is that Naruse is striving for a Brechtian effect; dramatic life so paper-thin and transparent before our eyes, structure so clear, it is exposed for the contrived fabrication it is. Characters mouth off the entire plot between them and every important moment has to be paused for the participants to explain inner turmoil, hushed whispers to the camera, our presence acknowledged.
The other is a little more intricate, a similar mechanism. The clue I believe, is the photo-book being flicked through by a girl in the opening scene.
The film is cut together so that time and different characters are blurred together, flattened, dissolved and merged as cutouts from the pages of the book. The film unfolds as possible story-fragments pieced together from nondescript images of the participants on the page – after the fact? entirely fictional and imagined?
And notice something else. Everyone is dressed in Western garb, stylish and ultra-modern, except for the naive young wife who is draped in a kimono. The father remarks that her traditional hairdo looks strange. The family house is a majestic pagoda, as seen in photos, but the interior is decorated in lavish Western fashion.
This is very cleverly annotated stuff, transparent fiction plus layers hiding the author; overblown melodrama as idle daydreaming of a misty-eyed Japanese girl, populating ordinary photographs with a wild imagination from movies – the movie limited by her limited imagination. She might as well be the bored housemaid, embroiling herself in imaginary intrigue and tragic love.
It was all lies, claims the son inside the nested fiction, after having proposed a - fake - double suicide.