Hisako loses her home in Tokyo to Allied bombing. With her husband fighting somewhere in Asia, she and her two children evacuate to a suburb of Kobe, where they share a house with Hisako's cousin, Kyoko. Kobe is bombed and Kyoko is killed. Hisako is forced to take care of Kyoko's two children in...
Subu makes pornographic films. He sees nothing wrong with it. They are an aid to a repressed society, and he uses the money to support his landlady, Haru, and her family. From time to time, Haru shares her bed with Subu, though she believes her dead husband, reincarnated as a carp, disapproves....
A 16-year-old girl works in a factory to pay her late father’s debt. When she makes up her mind to become a hostess, a boy approaches her with kind and gentle manners...(Also occasionally known in English as “Play”)
Kiku-chan to Ookami is, like most of the Sensou Douwa specials, based on a short story by Nosaka Akiyuki. It is set in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (the Chinese province of Manchuria) during the closing days of Word War II. Life for the Japanese colonists is tranquil, with none of the...
Teenagers are rebels without a cause. Let it be for stress relief or just a way to kill time, Mami (Kumiko Akiyoshi) and Chiaki were always up to no good – but their luck runs out when they shoplift with some other girls at a local supermarket. They flee from the scene and head back home, only to...
In the early Showa period, a young woman named Asako drifts into a certain red light district. She appears in a white dress, straw hat, and white parasol, which is out of place in this area, but what kind of past does she have, and what are her feelings as she drifts there?
In the final months of World War II, 14-year-old Seita and his sister Setsuko are orphaned when their mother is killed during an air raid in Kobe, Japan. After a falling out with their aunt, they move into an abandoned bomb shelter. With no surviving relatives and their emergency rations depleted,...
