Oriko and her mother had a difficult relationship. She knew of her mother's relationships with men, and insisted she stop, interfering in the affair. Now that her mother died in a mysterious accident, she attempts to find out more about her from her lovers. She herself is in an unhappy marriage; one without love. She wishes to divorce her husband, a prosperous, unfaithful man but he refuses. Through this dilemma she begins to understand her mother more and more, and that they are more alike than she thinks. After a long time, she attends another poetry meeting in the house of Mitsuhuru, a sculptor who had a relationship with her mother five years earlier, against which she had serious objections. And now she begins some affairs including him. Then she gets thrown into a romantic dilemma after succumbing to a rough laborer. At another time, she, always wearing traditional kimonos, witnesses the rape of her more frivolous sister-in-law.