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Filmed in 1957, Tadashi Imai's Junai Monogatari was released in the U.S. the following year as Story of a Pure Love. The title is tinged with irony: the young-lover protagonists (Hitomi Nakahara and Shinjiro Ebara) may be pure, but the society surrounding them is not. The heroine in particular is a victim of her environment, thrust into a girl's reformatory where violence is the order of the day. To make matters worse, she is slowly dying of anemia, the result of the Hiroshima bombing of 1945. Throughout, director Imai demonstrates his unique ability at combining entertainment value with trenchant social commentary. Story of a Pure Love was one of the hits of the 1958 Berlin Film Festival.