Naruse usually dealt with "downtown" subjects, but for his first color and widescreen film, he turned to a rural setting with a lyrical, open-air feeling and a surprising use of natural images. The story, however, is Naruse all over, about a war widow, Yae (Chikage Awashima), who attempts to alleviate the stifling boredom of farm life by writing stories about her agricultural village for a Tokyo newspaper, in the process falling in love with a married journalist. Her stories are mostly about her own family, landowners made poor by postwar land reform, now headed by her eldest brother who is trying to marry off three sons. "As is usual in a Naruse film," Audie Bock writes, "nothing truly momentous happens outside of what might be expected, and at the end contentment appears a far more remote possibility than at the beginning. The strength of the picture is that the characters seem real...and it escapes being either a blanket condemnation of feudal mores or a nostalgia piece about farm life. The modernization that gives Yae a taste of freedom at the same time wreaks her brother's defeat."