A kabuki actor's mistress hatches a jealous plot to bring down her lover's son.

A troupe of actors comes to town, short on funds and bedeviled by bad weather, so they can't put on shows. Kihachi is the troupe's leader. He steals off every day to visit Otsune (an ex-lover) and their son, Shinkichi, who believes his father is a long-dead civil servant. Kihachi has been paying Shinkichi's tuition, and he's now at university. Kihachi's lover, Otaka, the troupe's lead actress, learns Kihachi's secret and plots to ruin Shinkichi and humiliate Kihachi: she offers money to Otoki, the troupe's ingénue, to seduce Shinkichi. Soon the boy is head over heels, and Otoki finds herself with feelings for him. Can this end well or is tragedy at hand?—<[email protected]>

Kihachi Ichikawa has long led a traveling theater troupe in Japan. The town where the troupe has just arrived and where they have not been in four years is a place where Kihachi hopes they will stay for at least a year, as his illegitimate son, a now young man named Shinkichi, lives there with his mother, Kihachi's former mistress, Otsune, with who he still has an affectionate relationship. Otsune has told Shinkichi that his father died before he was born and was a civil servant, and that Kihachi is his uncle, as both Otsune and Kihachi did not want Shinkichi saddled with a vagabond lifestyle and an irresponsible traveling actor as a father, and wanted Shinkichi to achieve greatness in a profession other than acting. As such, Kihachi, without Shinkichi's knowledge, has paid for his schooling, Shinkichi who has recently graduated from agricultural college. No one in the troupe, including Otaka, one of the actresses with who Kihachi is currently in a relationship, knows about Otsune or Shinkichi in Kihachi's life. But when Otaka does find out about Otsune and Shinkichi conclusively, she decides to exact some revenge on Kihachi by hiring Otoki, who has grown up in the troupe and has just entered womanhood, to seduce Shinkichi to ruin his and by association Kihachi's life. This move has the potential to threaten the existence of the troupe but more importantly the harmony that exists between Kihachi, Otsune and Shinkichi if Shinkichi were ever to find out the truth about his father and about Otoki.—Huggo