Synopsis

Koda Setsuko is the wife of the owner of Hotel Royal, a love hotel which looks out on the Kushiro Marsh. Her husband Kiichiro is old enough to be her father. In fact, Kiichiro was a lover of Setsuko’s free-spirited mother, Fujishima Ritsuko, when Setsuko was a child. One morning, Setsuko takes breakfast with Kiichiro. Her interest is tanka poetry. Kiichiro sings a favourite poem to himself. He feels Setsuko’s sense of emptiness and weariness, and on the other hand the intense emotions coursing deep inside her, contained in that poem. She had recorded and published an anthology of poems called “Glass Reed” at his suggestion. That afternoon, while Setsuko is in bed with her lover, the consulting tax attorney Sawaki Masahiro, she receives word from the police that the car her husband had been driving has met with an accident. At the hospital, she is told by the doctor that he suffered serious brain injuries and has no hope of regaining consciousness. Then Setsuko runs into Ritsuko who has just arrived. Setsuko suffered abuse in her childhood and hates her mother fiercely. As Ritsuko proceeds to shout abuse at her, the darkness which Setsuko has repressed all this while, starts to overflow…