Disappointed by the marriage of her lover to a woman he does not love, prostitute Harumi drifts from the city to a remote Japanese outpost in Manchuria to work in a "comfort house," or brothel, during the Sino-Japanese War.

In 1950, Tamura's story was made into a more romantic film, Escape at Dawn, co-written by Akira Kurosawa and directed by Senkichi Taniguchi.

For the Nikkatsu adaptation, Suzuki drew upon his firsthand experience at the wartime front to portray the conditions and behavior in a more realistic light.

Most Japanese war movies portrayed the era with healthy doses of tragedy, but Suzuki infused an air of ludicrousness in his film.

[2] The manner in which Suzuki portrays Harumi and her quintessential role in the narrative makes Story of a Prostitute a female empowerment film.

“So her immediate decision to volunteer as a comfort woman, which is prostitution on the assembly-line model, is an inverted gesture of revenge, as if to say, ‘He’ll be sorry when he finds out what I’ve done.’”[4] Although Suzuki’s decision to make Harumi a volunteer assists the construction of her character and adds more drama to the narrative, “cases in which women became comfort women of their own free will were rare.”[3] Harumi is depicted as an attentive and sharp-witted woman, the predominant driving force of the narrative.

In fact, without Harumi’s convincing, Mikami would have committed suicide once captured by Chinese forces due to his “unquestioning devotion to the emperor, ” an unfortunate characteristic in every imperial Japanese soldier.

[5] The amount of sway Harumi holds in the narrative and the ways in which she communicates with all members of the Japanese army are heavily exaggerated and historically inaccurate.

It was not until five decades after World War II did past Korean comfort women come forth and share their dreadful experiences being physically and mentally abused by the Japanese military.

Aside from the development of Harumi’s character, Suzuki’s depiction of the Japanese military outpost and the living conditions of comfort women are also not incredibly historically accurate.

In this case, the first version of Tamura's story was chaste (the girls were "entertainers," not "comfort women") and romantically inclined, and Suzuki portrayed a far more realistic portrait of the ugly side of Japanese military life.