Ishii post-Shintoho bankruptcy. The train bound for Irimo Ito, filled with newlyweds on their honeymoon, promised journalist Shiro Wakamiya of Tohto Weekly a peaceful and, at most, fragrant workday thanks to the scent of Cattleya orchids from the moment he entered the carriages; couples snuggled up together, a lone lady reading philosophy, specifically Sartre’s ‘Existentialism is a Humanism.’ What could possibly go wrong with the visit to interview Professor Shimauchi about modern wives and the role of women at the Nishiyama Ryokan inn? This work is interesting as a mystery, but weak both as a noir due to the counterfeiting of dollars, and as a thriller or suspense story because there is never a sense of danger or ill will towards the journalist Wakamiya for bringing the whole scandal to light (with only 15 minutes to go), even though no viewer can deny that there will be at least five deaths from strange causes, starting with the fake suicide—from the cliff or into the sea—of Takeo Terada, who in reality was not newly married and did not commit suicide because his name was not Takeo, but rather he was an undercover police officer named Yasuo Iwabushi, who was investigating and monitoring —and blackmailed—the Military Research Institute headed by Colonel Shoichi Okuda as director, who also dies because he was trying to create his own network for counterfeiting Japanese banknotes with the fake interviewee Professor Shimauchi. But worst of all, although he apparently had ties to a printing press in the town of Manazuru, that place was burned down and in any case was too small to counterfeit all the fake money there because, as I said and you will know by the end, two crooks counterfeited money quite apart from the leader of the organisation to which they also belonged.

The one who supposedly helped Murata-san was actually Captain Hanaka, who made him walk to the hotel under false pretences, where his accomplices ambushed him and told the journalist played by Tsuruta how he poisoned Shimauichi with cyanide at the inn and, incidentally, took him to a bathtub to show him Tanikawa Yumi’s dead body. In fact, since Cattleya, who is actually the sister of the leader Hamaka, gave him the clue about the hydrangeas to go and investigate the Military Research Institute, which was tantamount to betraying her own brother, even though she was attracted to Wakamiya and the whole scene at the end, waiting for the scheduled bombing of that field, it is implausible that Hanaka would talk and talk and, being a metre away from his victim, would not notice her hand movements as she untied her rope.