Four resilient women struggle to survive as their sensuality draws men toward them. Six months after the broadcast announcing the end of the war, Chisato's husband still has not returned from the front, and a mailman threatens to withhold her letters unless she submits to him. Miki, left alone after her parents die in an air raid, is taken in by an innkeeper and becomes his woman. Juri runs a bar through a friend's connection, but debt collectors seize nearly all her earnings to repay her late husband's debt. Six years after Iroha's mother dies, her second father forces himself on her every day and demands obedience.