One-Way Ticket to Love (1960)

• 67%
• 1960
• Drama
• Music
• Romance
• Masahiro Shinoda
• Kazuya Kosaka
• Noriko Maki
• Yachiyo Ōtori

Focusing on four, the interactions between a group associated with the Yoshinaga Talent Agency in Tokyo are presented, it whose talent is exclusive to its own performing venues. Eiko Yoshinaga is the middle age manager and booking agent whose attention many non employed entertainers favor in getting work. Helped along by mock (i.e. paid) crowds of adoring young female fans, pop singer Susumu Ueno is the agency's most lucrative talent. He and Miss Yoshinaga are in a casual sexual relationship, something he is thinking about ending in wanting a relationship with someone closer to his own age. Hired without even an audition in Miss Yoshinaga needing someone specific, jazz alto saxophonist Kenji Shirai believed his life had no real purpose until this job and he proving himself in it, which has completely turned around his mentality. One evening, he runs into Mitsuko Maki, who he believed was about to attempt suicide, something from which he saves her. Indeed, she, needing to be needed in a relationship, is emotionally troubled in having just ended a relationship with a married man who had promised but reneged on leaving his wife for her. Understanding how she is feeling in having gone through those feelings of worthlessness himself until this job, Shirai convinces both Mitsuko and Miss Yoshinaga for the latter to hire the former, at this time as a dancer despite Mitsuko having no experience as such. For very specific reasons related to Shirai, Mitsuko agrees even after learning that the job is for a strip show and she needing to perform nude for it. Upon spotting her himself, Ueno starts to fall for Mitsuko. The interrelationships between this group become more complicated as Ueno's contract will soon be up for renegotiation, and as Shirai's roommate, who took a job as a yakuza solely to survive, asks Mistsuko, in purely running into her, to hold onto a package temporarily for him, he not disclosing its contents and telling her not to open it.