恋文 (1953)

After being demobilized and returning to Japan, Reikichi Mayumi (Masayuki Mori), a former elite serviceman, made a living by helping his friend from military school, Naoto Yamaji (Shigeyoshi Uno), at his younger brother’s apartment. Yamaji earned his living writing love letters in English for women kept by American servicemen, and many of these women came to him to ask him to write letters for them. One day, Michiko (Yoshiko Kuga), Reikichi’s former lover from before the war, came to see Yamaji. Reikichi had believed she married another man. He had heard rumors that she was widowed and had moved to Tokyo, but he had continued to picture her as the pure young woman she had been before the war. He was furious to see her apparently fallen so low as to be kept by American servicemen. Reikichi harshly berated Michiko for leaving him for another man, and for betraying the image he had cherished of her as a pure young woman. Afterward, tormented by his love for and hatred of her, he sank into drink. But after her husband was killed in the war, Michiko had found it unbearable to stay with her husband’s family, at her stepmother’s house, and had left her marital home. While working in connection with the occupation forces in Yokohama, she was tormented by loneliness and came to live with a foreign officer who had treated her kindly. Her life in Yokohama had not been as dissolute as Reikichi and the others imagined: she had not been living as a prostitute, and she had since parted from the officer and was alone again. But when Michiko realized that Reikichi was not convinced even after she explained these circumstances, she became overwhelmed and threw herself in front of a vehicle’s headlights. When the police told Reikichi that Michiko had been seriously injured, he finally realized that, whatever her past, she was someone precious to him. In the car on the way to the hospital where Michiko was being treated, Reikichi wept uncontrollably and kept praying to God to let her survive.