Consistently voted one of the greatest of all Japanese films, Floating Clouds is an adaptation of Hayashi Fumiko's tragic study of a woman's degradation in the face of obsessive love for a worthless man amid the chaos of postwar Tokyo. During the war Yukiko (Hideko Takamine) and Kengo (Masayuki Mori) were lovers at the Indochina front where he was a soldier and she a nurse. Repatriated in 1946, both return to a vastly changed society which no longer holds any meaning for them. Yukiko attempts to revive their relationship but Kengo refuses to leave his wife to marry her. Left to fend for herself, she becomes increasingly lost in her memories of the love in Indochina, while he sets about in relentless pursuits of his own interests. In depicting the hardships of life in postwar Japan, where the homeless stand about the streets while a frantic westernization takes place all around them, Naruse, like the author Fumiko, focuses with bitter resignation on the renewal of an ancient tradition--the exploitation of women--in this new society. Joan Mellon writes in The Waves at Genji's Door, “Naruse suggests that having failed the Japanese woman in the postwar environment, the Japanese male has lost his integrity. He has become no better than the exploiting Americans.... The sufferings at the end of the war have been met by Yukiko with a strength that life seems to grant only to the oppressed.”