Considered by many to be Naruse's pre-war masterpiece, the film was also the first Japanese "talkie" to be exhibited commercially in the United States. Kimiko, a "modern-thinking" office worker, decides to re-unite her estranged parents. She seeks out her father, who has been living with a former geisha in the country for several years; pleading with him to consider his obligations to her mother, she persuades him to return with her. Perhaps in none of his other works in this period does Naruse so determinedly flout the conventions of cinematic narration; space is relentlessly fragmented in the film, so that even characters conversing together in the same room are locked into visually discontiguous areas.