[1][2] Starring Yū Aoi and Issey Takahashi, the film is set in Japan during World War II, and centers on a wife who starts suspecting that her husband may be a spy for the United States.

[1] A theatrical version of Wife of a Spy was selected in the main competition section of the 77th Venice International Film Festival,[3][4] where it won the Silver Lion.

[5] Members of the Japanese military police seize and arrest a British silk merchant on charges of espionage.

The British merchant says goodbye to Yūsaku and his wife Satoko (Aoi) at their home and tells them he is going to Shanghai as he can no longer do business in Japan.

After the new year, he informs Satoko that he and Fumio are going on a short business trip to Manchuria to import cheap medicine and other goods.

Shortly after their return, Fumio announces that he will be leaving the company for a ryokan in Arima to write a novel about his experiences in Manchuria before he is drafted.

She visits Fumio in Arima and finds him disheveled and incandescent in his room, where he shouts at her about her unseeing ignorance of her husband's actions to maintain her comfortable lifestyle.

She is brought before Taiji and beseeches him to be the gentle person she knew in childhood, but he hits her across the face and says that she deserves death for treason.

In March 1945, Satoko has been confined to a mental hospital for an untold number of months when Dr. Nozaki, a friend of hers and Yūsaku's, comes to see her and promises to get her out through his connections with Imperial University.

He admits having heard a rumor that Yūsaku was seen in Bombay boarding a ship to Los Angeles which is believed to have sunk.