1939. Sakura Nishi finds herself fighting a losing battle tending to shell-shocked soldiers when she’s dispatched to a hospital on the frontline of Japan’s war with China. As the Chinese troops close in, she becomes drawn to head surgeon Dr. Okabe who has retreated into his morphine addiction.

Images of gruesomely deformed bodies haunt Yasuzô Masumura’s heady anti-war masterpiece, which sidesteps the empty glory of combat to tend to the wounds of the soul. A quivering light in a world dominated by men, Ayako Wakao’s traumatized nurse embodies the horrors that exist beyond the battlefield.