With its bright comfortable surface covering dark themes of mother-daughter conflict and of incest, this extraordinary melodrama, set in Yokohama and its suburbs, recalls American films like Written on the Wind and Marnie while it follows Toyoda's own A Flower Never Fades (see June 4) into the postwar era. In 1957, in a newly prosperous Japan, the American "occupation" is everywhere, in convertible cars and Western-style homes. A young woman, Ryoko (Ayako Wakao), returning from college in America, naively delights that her businesswoman mother, Nori, is "the emancipated type." She only gradually learns of the sordid compromises upon which Nori's "liberation," and her own middle-class status, are based. (A sub-plot of accidental/inevitable incest links this film with another "port" film, the Mexican Woman of the Port, see May 29). Nori, as interpreted by Toyoda perennial Chikage Awashima, is a veritable complex of resources, rationales-and no regrets. In this woman who refuses at all costs to be poor, we see a new Japan. Color films, alas, do fade, and this is always a loss, even if the resultant hot-pink wash in our rare print is somehow appropriate to tenor of the melodrama.