A Design for Dying

Heitaro, who had served his firm loyally for 30 years, reaches the retirement age. He has four unmarried daughters and decides to split his retirement allowance he has received from his firm into 500,000 yen for each daughter as a wedding dowry. He considers them all old enough to handle the money, and gives them a free hand to use it as they wish.

The film consists of three short stories. Tomiko, the heroine of the first story, "The Flower Girl" (dir. Kozaburo Yoshimura), is a little girl who bears the unbearable burden of caring for her family. Tomiko's father has been unable to find work for a long time, and her older sister is terminally ill—it is unlikely that she will ever recover. To feed her family, Tomiko runs around the city from morning until late at night selling flowers... The second novella (dir. Tadashi Imai) also depicts the lives of the poor. An unfamiliar girl brings young Kavano a letter from his mother. It turns out that the girl's name is Kuniko, she is very hardworking, but her family is dying of hunger. Therefore, her mother decided to send Kuniko to her son so that he would marry her. The short story is called "The Unexpected Bride." The third short story, which gave the film its title, is particularly interesting: "When You Love" (dir. Satsuo Yamamoto). It shows the family of a young peace activist.

Kohei Akiyama, a popular master swordsman, and his son Daijiro live in the town of Edo in good faith. While running a dojo, Daijiro and his father find themselves wrapped up in a series of events with the town's people.

Among Yoshimura’s complex and political works, this episodic film, set in the early 1930s, follows the life of a young left-wing student activist disenchanted by the increasingly hawkish state of Japanese society.

About an establishment where old men pay to sleep besides young girls that had been narcotized and happen to be naked, the sleeping beauties. The old men are expected to take sleeping pills and share the bed for a whole night with a girl without attempting anything of bad taste like putting a finger inside their mouths.

Ginko, a poor cobbler's daughter, becomes a geisha to support her family. She passes from one geisha house to the next, trying to find love and hope in the process. No matter how hard she tries, she just can't escape her sad fate.

Postwar Tokyo. Pin and Toku live in the squatter area of Kappanuma. Pin and Toku are avid gamblers. They take in Tsuru, a slightly demented woman who has run away from a geisha house.

Seventeen years after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a newspaper reporter looks for the bomb's effects, but everyone seems to have forgotten. He meets a woman who was there when it happened but when they fall in love she isn't able to move on.

Shows the devastation caused by the atomic bomb, and by use of a fictional storyline, portrays the struggle of the ordinary Japanese people in dealing with the aftermath.

Fisherman Choon-sam (Yoon Buk-yang) is suffering financially because of a prolonged scarcity of fish. Pestered by miserly Mr. Jang to pay back his debt, Choon-sam goes out to sea in hopes of a catch but meets a watery end instead. As payment for the debt, Mr. Jang tries to take Choon-sam's daughter In-soon as his second wife. Meanwhile, In-soon (Park Noh-kyung) is mutually in love with Chun-suk (Park Hak), but torn about the suggestion of Ok-bun (Chun Hyo-bong), who lives in Seoul, to join her in the city. In order to get a job and pay back her father's debt, In-soon follows Mr. Jang's son Chul-soo to Seoul, not knowing that he harbors illicit intentions toward her.

The tale of a feudal swordsman who cynically takes no responsibility for anything, relegating it to others, and then taking the credit.

The story of two sisters in post-war Japan. One is a geisha and the other works for the tourist board.

Ichiro’s family used to be a large landowner, but now he is living in poverty with his mother. His mother works hard to get her son through school. Under such circumstances, Ichiro meets Wakako, the daughter of a wealthy man, and they fall in love with each other, but they are opposed by those around them because of their different social status.

The first story concerns an attractive young woman who works in a Tokyo nightclub. Her plan for a solid financial future has a double whammy. In the second story, a beautiful young woman is employed by an unscrupulous real estate agent to convince male clients to invest in worthless property. The last story is about a widowed geisha who has no real financial worries and who falls in love with a forger.