Yoshiko Tsubouchi brings her three children to her brother's home. He can only take one of them. Another goes to her elderly uncle, the school teacher and the third goes with her on the road because there's no place to leave him in the hard world of post-war Japan.
Miss Tsoubouchi may be the antagonist of this film, walking in the rain, watching the traveling troupe of kabuki actresses discuss how the weather will keep away the audience, being thrown out of their apartment, falling ill, but it is the mostly silent boy we watch in Hiroshi Shimizu's movie. In the 1930s he directed all sorts of movies, but about 1940 he began to concentrate on the problems of the young, the unwanted, the unregarded with INTROSPECTION TOWER. His movies slowed during the war as he worked with refugee children. After the war, he made movies about them, their problems. Here, the problem is that he exists, and he knows it. He has watched his brother and sister left behind, and he fears the same for himself. Yet like children everywhere, he thinks his life is normal, hard though it may be, with a mother who doesn't seem to care for him, and who seeks for a way to be rid of him. His silence, his acceptance, is more heartbreaking than anything else could be.
