Immortal Love

1932. Heibei, the son of a wealthy landowner, has just returned home to his Japanese village being injured in the Sino-Japanese War, he feeling emasculated due to now having a permanent limp. He finds that Sadako, the daughter of one of his father's tenant farmers, has grown into a beautiful young woman. Sadako and Takeshi, who is the member of another tenant farming family and who is also away at war, have long been in love. Using his family's power as the landlords and using his own power as a man in raping Sadako, Heibei forces her to marry him against her will, despite he knowing of Sadako and Takeshi's relationship, or arguably because of it in Heibei being jealous of Takeshi in he always having been held up as the model of the proper way to behave and act as a man. Their resulting stories in four subsequent periods (1944, 1949, 1960, and 1961) are told with Heibei and Sadako having had two more children beyond the son conceived from the rape, and Takeshi too having married someone he would find he didn't love in she not being Sadako, they regardless having had a son. The question becomes whether any within this collective could find any happiness or peace in their lives being affected so profoundly by those acts of 1932.