一个关于竞争与自我牺牲的爱情故事，发生于明治末期。三弦琴艺人鹤八与民谣歌家鹤次郎是一个传统音乐组合。不过他们常常争吵。他们分开了，鹤次郎却无法靠自己兴旺。他们就又复合了，但当鹤次郎发现鹤八陷入一场恋爱之中时，便故意与她争执到分崩离析的地步，好让她安心去结婚。

At the turn of the century, all of the Earth's monsters have been rounded up and kept safely on Monsterland. Chaos erupts when a race of she-aliens known as the Kilaaks unleash the monsters across the world.

In his review of Feminine Melancholy in Kinema Junpo, critic Mizumachi Seiji praises Irie's performance as the best of her talkie career. However, he is very critical of the film itself, which he sees as a typical story of a woman in an unhappy marriage. He is not sympathetic toward the heroine's patient suffering and describes the nagging mother-in-law as a "hackneyed theme." Naruse's detailed "documentation" of Hiroko's role in the household is dismissed as a "manneristic obsession," and Mizumachi suggests that the director is hiding behind "the shadow of the materials." Most severely, he criticizes Naruse for "abandoning his authority as an auteur" by resorting to "shinpa-tragedy," which is seen as a capitulation to a form that has "wielded a powerful hold over the imagination of the masses." Although Mizumachi notes that Naruse has probed into "the deepest recess of the female psyche," he doesn't recognize this as the film's achievement, perhaps because he is looking for something else from the director. His review reveals the difficulties Naruse faced in maintaining his "auteur status" while moving with the tides of popular culture. For Mizumachi, the character of Yoko is the most typical Naruse heroine, perhaps because she is dragged down by her delinquent lover; however, in retrospect, it is evident that Hiroko's tenacious survival of adverse circumstances looks forward to Naruse's postwar heroines.

Kimiko, a Tokyo white-collar working girl, lives with her serious, intellectual, haiku-writing mother. Kimiko seeks to marry her boyfriend but needs her absent father to act as the go-between and negotiate the marriage. Kimiko travels and finds her father living with a second family.

The classic story of English POWs in Burma forced to build a bridge to aid the war effort of their Japanese captors. British and American intelligence officers conspire to blow up the structure, but Col. Nicholson, the commander who supervised the bridge's construction, has acquired a sense of pride in his creation and tries to foil their plans.