An old man, Masao (Chishu Ryu), is being rowed up the river to the place of his youth. "Life is a short dream," he muses...The barren, rocky shore where he disembarks, a no-man's-land, and the house to which he walks, a ghost house, are something other than life, perhaps death. Life, in this film, is something framed by the distance of memory, tiny figures etched into a cameo, moving fervently about a glistening world of cotton and chrysanthemums, captured in long-shot and punctuated by an old man's poetic voice-over. Kinoshita sustains this mood using iris frames and still images, horizontal pans and startling shadows, drenching his screen with sun and then with rain. The dream that is the old man's life is of childhood sweethearts, Masao and his older cousin Tamiko, whose friendship reaches an epiphany in the fields where they work together. But they are torn apart by local gossip and a mother's ambitions for her son. In Kinoshita's films, morality consists not of prevailing winds but of pure emotions. We recommend at least two handkerchiefs.