Professor Somiya, a widower in his fifties, lives in the suburbs of Tokyo with his 27-year-old daughter Noriko. It is an arrangement that suits them both...
[More...]
In 17th Century Japan, a fifty-year-old prostitute named Oharu looks back on her life in sorrow. When she was a young woman, she brought disgrace on herself and her family by falling in love with a man from an inferior caste...
[More...]
Japan in the mid-19th century. A rundown tenement in a slum area is home to a bedraggled hodge-podge of thieves, gamblers and prostitutes, lowlife who have no future and who live on futile dreams...
[More...]
Japan, 1923. Otsune is a poor widow who struggles to bring up her only son Ryosuke in the rural town of Shinshu. One day, Ryosuke's teacher Ookubo visits Otsune and persuades her to allow her son to continue his studies after he leaves elementary school...
[More...]
In late 19th century Japan, a young carpenter named Shinnosuke must choose a woman to take as his bride. So far his aunt's attempts to find him a suitable wife have failed, but he is no hurry to marry...
[More...]
Kihachi and Jiro are two brewery workers living in a slum district of Tokyo. A widower, Kihachi has a young son, Tomio, who is ashamed of his father for being poor and illiterate...
[More...]
In 16th century Japan, the aging warlord Hidetora Ichimonji gathers together his family and announces his intention to pass on his power to his three sons, who will each have a share of his kingdom...
[More...]
In mid-19th century Japan, Yasumoto, a young doctor fresh out of medical school, sees a bright future for himself and has high hopes of becoming the personal physician of the Shogunate...
[More...]
Japan, sometime in the 1840s. Nine young samurai suspect that the lord chamberlain of their clan, Mutsuta, is complicit in the wave of organised crime that is threatening their community...
[More...]
In 11th Century Japan, an aristocratic woman, Tamaki, and her two young children, Zushio and Anju, leave their home to look for their father...
[More...]
In present day Japan, Ichiro Aoye is an artist who makes the fatal mistake of offering a lift on his motorcycle to a famous singer, Miyako Saijo...
[More...]
Japan in the sixteenth century is riven by civil wars which allow gangs of maraudiung bandits to tyrannise village communities across the country...
[More...]
Having completed her studies, a twenty-year old Belgian girl, Amélie, returns to Japan, the country where she spent the first five years of her life...
[More...]
Shuji Hashizume, a struggling professional artist, is driven to steal money at gunpoint so that he can pay for medical treatment for his chronically sick infant daughter...
[More...]
Shuhei Horikawa is a schoolteacher and widower who is devotedly attached to his ten-year-old son, Ryohei. During a class outing, some of his pupils disobey his instructions and go off on a boating trip, in which one of them drowns...
[More...]
Some years after he graduated, Shinji Okajima has a young family and a job with an insurance company in Tokyo. His son wants a bicycle and so, reluctantly, Shinji promises to buy him one with money from his annual bonus...
[More...]
Shukichi and Tomi Hirayama, a retired couple in their sixties, undertake a long journey from their home in the Japanese town of Onomichi to visit their grown-up children in Tokyo...
[More...]
Shukichi Sugiyama is a senior bank employee who lives in Tokyo with his two grown-up daughters, Akiko and Takako. It has been many years since Shukichi's wife walked out on him and his daughters to pursue an affair with another man, and now history appears to be repeating itself...
[More...]
1941. In an attempt to weaken Japan after its seizure of Indochina, the United States imposes an embargo that will deprive the country of essential raw materials...
[More...]
Komiya is a respected professor of medicine at Tokyo University. His wife, Tokiko, rules the roost in his house. Sparks begins to fly when the couple's teenage niece from Osaka, Setsuko, pays a visit...
[More...]
Ryoichi is a student who is financially dependent on his older sister Chikako. To pay for her brother's education, Chikako supplements her daytime income as a typist by, so she claims, working evenings for a university professor...
[More...]
Japan, 1860. With the country in a state of terminal decline following the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate, a Ronin Samurai who has fallen on hard times arrives at a small provincial town that has degenerated into gang warfare...
[More...]