When a Woman Ascends the Stairs 1960

Keiko, Hideko Takamine, a young widow approaching 30, works as a hostess at a Ginza bar. Realizing she is getting older, after talking with her bar manager Kenichi Komatsu, Tatsuya Nakadai, she resolves to open her own bar rather than remarrying and dishonoring the memory of her late husband, to whom she remains devoted. To make this dream a reality, she pursues loans from affluent patrons who frequent the bar, but she finds little success and the financial path ahead looks stubbornly obstructed.

Meanwhile, Yuri, Keiko Awaji, a former employee, has opened a bar nearby, drawing away most of Keiko’s former customers. She scouts locations for her own place with a confidant of her bar, Junko, Reiko Dan, undecided about where to launch. During a shared lunch, Yuri reveals that she is deeply in debt and cannot pay her creditors. She confides that she plans to fake a suicide to keep her creditors at bay. Keiko is shocked to learn the next day that Yuri has actually died, and that she may have planned her death all along or misjudged the amount of sleeping pills needed. Keiko then faces the harsh reality of Yuri’s creditors pressing on Yuri’s grieving family.

After Keiko is diagnosed with a peptic ulcer, she retreats to her family home to recover. It becomes clear that she must send money to keep her brother out of jail while also paying for an operation that her nephew, crippled by polio, needs in order to walk again. Keiko tells them she cannot afford to give money as she must maintain an expensive apartment and kimono, but she reluctantly agrees, realizing this will forestall any plan to open her own bar.

Back at her bar, a man she briefly entertains proposes marriage, only to turn out as a fraud. She then sets her sights on Fujisaki, a businessman who promises to provide money after having sex with her, but reveals he has been transferred to Osaka and cannot abandon his family. Keiko receives a stern lecture from Komatsu, who loves her but has made no attempt to express it out of respect for her reverence to her dead husband and her resolve not to have sex with other men. He asks Keiko to marry him and open a new bar together. She declines, saying that a marriage like this could not work since > they know each other too well. < And though she cannot bring herself to say it aloud, she loves the married Fujisaki. Still in love with Keiko, Komatsu quits the bar. Keiko returns to work, ascending the stairs and pretending to be happy.