Successful and married with children, paper-mill owner Jihei knows better than to contradict the strict social and moral codes of 18th-century Japan. But when he meets the lovely courtesan Koharu, he becomes a man obsessed. Koharu returns his love, even foregoing other customers while Jihei schemes...
A team of geophysicists investigating seismic activity on the seafloor discover that the islands of Japan, after suffering from massive volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, will be pulled into the ocean, killing millions.
The president of the Japanese National Railways is found dead during a period in which train service is plagued by numerous layoffs, strikes and shutdowns. The government says that the president was murdered; the police claim it was a suicide. A quizzical reporter follows the case for years, but...
The upstart Godai family conglomerate plans to strengthen ties with the hardliners in the Kwantung Army as they plan military expansion into Manchuria.
A young Japanese-American man arrives at his grandmother's old hometown in Yamaguchi, begins to stay at her family's elite but dysfunctional household, and gets entangled in a sinister plot of murder.
To satisfy her lover's fetish for tattooed women, Akane agrees to have her body covered in eloborate tattoos by Kyogoro, an old craftsman. Kyogoro has developed a special technique, by which his assistant, Harutsune, keeps Katsuko's mind off the pain while Kyogoro does his work. After the work is...
Ken Ogata plays Shiro Miyagi, a sprinter with Olympic aspirations whose dreams were shattered by WWII. A broken man, he leads the dissolute life of a gigolo until a chance meeting with a fiery young athlete named Hiroko (Michiyo Yasuda). Realizing that she has talent as a sprinter, Miyagi sees a...
Two soon-to-be kamikaze pilots stop by a local school near their base to play the piano one last time, leaving a deep impression on a teacher. Years later, she seeks out the relatives of the pilots when the piano is old and about to be discarded.
An industrialist is diagnosed with terminal cancer. He is on a trip to Europe at the time, and a glimpse of a Japanese woman in that setting causes him to fantasize about her as the personification of his impending death. As his dialogue with his imagined mortality continues, he actually meets the...
A run-in with the police once again puts three former reformatory inmates on the wrong side of the law. Their situation becomes increasingly desperate as events spin out of control, culminating in an audacious hijack at sea...
A promising post-graduate literature student is transformed into a psychotic killer following the suicide of his father and a sleazy affair by his mother with a younger man.
