Consistently voted one of the greatest works of the Japanese cinema, the film follows two mismatched lovers from the time of their meeting in Indochina during the war through their unhappy end several years later. After their initial affair, the two return to a Japan that no longer has the same meaning for either of them—he to his wife, and she to a lonely existence that prompts her to focus more and more obsessively on the love she has lost.  In the frenetic atmosphere of a postwar Japan rebuilding and westernizing, the memory of their brief encounter becomes a symbol for a life and tradition lost to a new world.