Three street toughs -- well, two and Shinji Tanaka, who's hanging around the railroad station, trying to get to his hometown, whom they threaten into helping them -- are going to rob a suburban house. It will be an easy job. Once the husband goes to work, it will be a housewife (Hideko Takamine) and her old mother-in-law (Akiko Tamura). If they make any trouble, well, hoods have knives.
Except that while they watch the house, the kid stays home, Hideko's sisters visit, and a brother-in-law and tatami repairmen and the whole place is as busy as.... well, what's Japanese for Grand Central Station? And everyone bickers, and schemes and shouts. There the hoods are, waiting for the opportunity that seems like it will never come in Keisuke Kinoshita's black comedy about life among the working poor.
Its rhythms remain odd to me, but the concerns of everyone -- ill-tempered, penny-pinching grandma, oppressed Hideko, her self-centered, marginal sisters (including Toshiko Kobayashi, with whom Miss Takamine worked so well in the two "Carmen" films), even the three hoods, all have real issues, which they all try to deal with in unattractive ways. The constant boil of incidents and wondering what ugly, funny thing these characters would do next kept me interested all the way through.
