Toyoda has sensitively adapted Naoya Shiga's A Dark Night's Passing, a novel whose personal, self-examinatory style makes it a challenge to the filmmaker. Shiga's protagonist is a young writer, the second son of a wealthy family, whose lonely journey to self-knowledge is beset by family betrayals and unhappy revelations about his paternity. A modern classic of Japanese literature (written in the early twenties, though not completed until 1937), A Dark Night's Passing was an extraordinarily bold work for its day and is still read and loved by young Japanese.