Story of Pure Love

Filmed in 1957, Tadashi Imai’s Junai Monogatari was released in the U.S. the following year as Story of a Pure Love. The title is tinged with irony: the young-lover protagonists (Hitomi Nakahara and Shinjiro Ebara) may be pure, but the society surrounding them is not. The heroine in particular is a victim of her environment, thrust into a girl’s reformatory where violence is the order of the day. To make matters worse, she is slowly dying of anemia, the result of the Hiroshima bombing of 1945. —Hal Erickson