This is a delightful comedy with a casual touch of the perverse and spiked with acid social observation, based as it is on a novel by Junichiro Tanizaki. Hisaya Morishige, who is the embodiment of the tragicomic Toyoda ethos from the young roustabout in Marital Relations to the octogenarian in Twilight Years, here plays a man who "just gets older and doesn't mature." A mama's boy caught between the demands of not one but two manipulative wives, Shozo prefers the company of his cat, Lily, with her "come hither eyes" and her familiar feline smell. Lily becomes a pawn in a very strange custody battle. Amid Toyoda's superb lived-in domestic settings, with laundry hanging everywhere "like an exhibition," is a definitive if screwball study of home: women, it is noted, have no real homes, while the cat is at home anywhere and thus nowhere. Shozo himself becomes a vagabond by playing out an ambivalence which, Donald Richie notes, is the director's signature: weighing the traditional demands of society against the lure of complete freedom.