Mr. Mita (Shuji Sano), an insurance-company executive, is transferred to Osaka where he befriends the female denizens of a cheap canal-side hotel. A writer by night, like the filmmaker himself he stands a bit apart and yet is filled with compassion for these women's struggles in the city that is known as Japan's money capital. The alcoholic geisha whose love for Mita is unrequited, the maid who pilfers trinkets for her long-lost child, the landlady with her own troubles: all live at the mercy of money, suppressing their higher instincts to that of survival in this intimate portrait of postwar materialism. An Inn at Osaka is a key example of Gosho's particular slice-of-life approach: within the corridors and rooms of the inn, and the industrial neighborhood that surrounds it, a story is built from incident and mood and captured in hundreds of shots stunningly framed by cinematographer Joji Ohara. Nobuko Otowa is memorable as the geisha Oyo ("a dense, beautifully written role" Elliot Stein, Village Voice), and the entire ensemble cast does credit to Gosho's rejection of the star system in his independent films of the fifties. "An extremely powerful and a very sad film, it is-in its very understatement-one of the very best of the indictments of postwar Japan" (Anderson and Richie, The Japanese Film).