A teacher in a poor island community tries to improve his students' spirits by entering them in a volleyball tournament as long-shot underdogs.

A demobilized soldier becomes a day laborer with a road construction gang, and his wife goes to work to bolster their income. Their modest dream is to see their son grow and to be happy as a family.

A jewelry store president begins to fall for the doctor treating her husband's illness.

After her mother runs away from home, Tomoko is raised to be a geisha. One day Tomoko meets her mother in a red-light district in Tokyo and her life deeply gets in trouble.

A Tokyo family escaping the war relocates to a Hokkaido village; their daughter is set to marry the local leader's son, but her siblings disapprove.

In a time of continuous civil wars ravaging the fields of feudal Japan, the eldest son of a very poor peasant family, living alongside the bridge over the Fuefuki river, decides to serve a warlord to escape his miserable condition, being soon followed by his younger brothers. Although not all the men of the family take this tragic path of death, women of the family will be doomed to endure the pain of loss during the next five generations.