A Legend or Was It?

A family fleeing the war moves from Tokyo to a village in Hokkaido. In the village they are outsiders and are watched carefully from the start. It is arranged that the daughter of the family will marry the son of the man whose word carries weight there, but her brothers are against the match, and their objection upsets the balance in the village. The mistrust felt towards a family from outside soon turns into open hostility. The film tells the pressure rising in the countryside in the last years of the war and how a community chooses who belongs to it. Kinoshita draws his fear not from anything supernatural but from neighbourliness. Shima Iwashita and Mariko Kaga appear in Keisuke Kinoshita’s eighty three minute Japanese film, completed in 1963.