The film stars Setsuko Hara who plays the part of Taeko Nasu, the beautiful mistress of Tohata.

It may seem ironic, choosing a young idiot as his hero, but in this world, goodness and idiocy are often equated.

He was the son of an old Sapporo family, and his father's harsh discipline had made him feel like a caged animal.

Akama is returning home to Hokkaido for the first time since he stole money from his father to buy a diamond ring for Taeko.

Taeko was the beautiful mistress of a rich man named Tohata since she was a child, but she ran away six months earlier, at the same time as when Akama had bought her the ring.

Tohata, in an attempt to sever his ties with Taeko and avoid public disgrace for his long-term abusive treatment of her, which has twisted her psyche and made her a social pariah, offers a dowry of Y600,000 to Kayama if he will marry Taeko, a deal which was brokered by Mr. Ono.

Ayako vacillates violently between expressing love and hate for Kameda and cannot understand what Taeko's true motives are, since they have never met.

He does not want her corpse to start to smell, so the two men do not light a fire and spend the night huddled around candles and bundled under blankets before they both, seemingly, die the next morning.

[1] After a single, poorly received, screening of the full-length version, the film was severely cut at the request of the studio.

When the re-edited version was also deemed too long by the studio, Kurosawa sardonically suggested the film be cut lengthwise instead.

Since I was little I've liked Russian literature, but I find that I like Dostoevsky the best and had long thought that this book would make a wonderful film.