Humanity and Paper Balloons

A hanging was found in a slum tenement in Edo, and the neighbors have only just begun to talk about it. Matajuro Unno (Chōjūrō Kawarasaki), a ronin, waits for the old master of his dead father to offer him work, while the disgraced hairdresser Shinza (Kan'emon Nakamura) plans to kidnap a pawnbroker's daughter. Sadao Yamanaka, in his last film, puts these two men in the same cramped alley, where each hears the other's door through a thin wall.