Shusei Tokuda's starkly realistic novel about a poor girl pressed into becoming a geisha was forcefully adapted by Kaneto Shindo (Onibaba). When Ginko (Nobuko Otowa, Shindo's wife) falls in love with one of her clients, she is handily rebuffed by the young man's wealthy family, and left to wander from geisha house to geisha house. "Shindo's women, in contrast to (his mentor) Mizoguchi's heroines, are neither naively beautiful nor awe-inspiring. However, they are more outspoken and attack the male-oriented society with more fury. In earlier works like Epitome...Shindo differs from Mizoguchi by idealizing the intimidating capacity of Japanese women for sustained work, and contrasting them with shamefully lazy men." (Tadao Sato, Currents in Japanese Cinema) "(The film presented) a general exposé of the world of the geisha, insisting upon the sordidness behind the glamorous facade. (It) was so excessively explicit that there were parts where one could scarcely bear to look at the screen. As a whole the film attempted to move beyond realism to naturalism and was, in some parts, quite successful." (Anderson and Richie, The Japanese Film)