Ginko’s younger brother Tetsuro, a failed comedian, is the oddball of the family. Embarrassing, loud and plain inappropriate at times causes Ginko to disown him. The two reunite when she discovers Tetsuro is terminally ill. Tetsuro’s impending death marks the beginning of love and toleration.
Read More »
Tag Archives: japanese
Aki tachinu / Autumn Has Already Started (1960) Mikio Naruse, Nobuko Otowa, Jun Fujimaki, Kamatari Fujiwara, Drama
Single mum (father of child dead) from the country with 6th grade boy comes to Tokyo, leaves the boy to live with his uncle’s family – wife, male, female teens, run a struggling greengrocer – and lives/ works in local inn. He gets bullied/ fights with local boys, goes to the baths, plays basketball, is befriended by his male cousin and becomes friendly with grade 4 girl who’s the daughter of the innkeeper, who employs his mum and is the longterm mistress of a businessman from another town, who’s the girl’s father and who brings her half sister and brother to meet her but they’re mean to her. Meanwhile the boy’s mother gets friendly with one of the inn’s clients and chucks her job for a trip or something more permanent with him. The young girl takes him shopping, and wants the boy to live with her and her mother, but mother and father refuse so the two kids go to a seaside where he sprains his ankle and they’re late back even though the police get them and they’re in trouble. The boy loses his beetle and tries to get another for the girl for a school project but when he does, she’s moved house with her mother at the urging of her father.
Read More »
Kotoko (2011) Shin’ya Tsukamoto, Yûko Nakamura, Cocco, Drama, Horror
The story of a single mother who suffers from double vision; caring for her baby is a nerve-wrecking task that eventually leads her to a nervous breakdown. She is suspected of being a child abuser when things get out of control and her baby is taken away.
Read More »
Akutô / A Scoundrel (1965) Kaneto Shindô, Nobuko Otowa, Kyôko Kishida, Eitarô Ozawa, Drama, Romance
A provincial warlord who has seized power after success in battle is our titular ‘scoundrel’. His court lady is one of those fallen down from her days in the imperial court and he intimidates her to help him seduce another ex-court woman now married to a smaller lord. She is a great beauty and his lust for her consumes him. However, true love cannot be corrupted by power and lust. The resulting tragedy unfolds as the wheel of dharma turns.
Read More »
H Story (2001) Nobuhiro Suwa, Béatrice Dalle, Kou Machida, Hiroaki Umano, Drama
An autobiographical docudrama about an attempt to remake Alain Resnais’ 1959 film Hiroshima Mon Amour.
Read More »
Shiawase no kiiroi hankachi / The Yellow Handkerchief (1977) Yôji Yamada, Ken Takakura, Chieko Baishô, Kaori Momoi, Comedy, Drama
The story starts with Kinya, who has recently upgraded his car. He’s a young adult and he’s single so naturally he uses his ride to ahem, look for companions. He offers a ride to a shy girl by the name of Akemi and she reluctantly accepts. From the get go, sexual tension is apparent, but things get a bit easier as the two become acquainted. They pick up Yusaku, a 30-something coal miner with a reserved personality. The story slowly begins to shift from the comedic hijinks of Kinya and Akemi to Yusaku’s mental drama. He’s hiding something about his past, which he either wants to forget or is trying to remember.
Read More »
Sanshô dayû / Sansho the Bailiff (1954) Kenji Mizoguchi, Kinuyo Tanaka, Yoshiaki Hanayagi, Kyôko Kagawa, Drama
In mediaeval Japan a compassionate governor is sent into exile. His wife and children try to join him, but are separated, and the children grow up amid suffering and oppression.
Read More »
Utsukushisa to kanashimi to / With Beauty And Sorrow (1965) Masahiro Shinoda, Kaoru Yachigusa, Mariko Kaga, Sô Yamamura, Drama, Romance
Long before the events of the movie Ôki, who was approaching middle age, had a relation to 16-year-old Otoko. She got pregnant, but the child was stillborn. Their relation stopped at the same time. Much later Ôki had become a famous writer, not least because of a novel about this love story. Otoko had become a famous painter. But she had never overcome the double early trauma and had become a Lesbian. Her favourite student and beloved one was the beautiful Keiko. 24 years after the early love Ôki goes from Tokyo to Kyoto to meet Otoko. The meeting is polite with secret emotional shadows. Keiko makes a plan. She intends to seduce Ôki, become pregnant, bear Ôki’s child and give it to Otoko. She hopes that Otoko may thereby get rid of her trauma. But she also wants to take her revenge on the man who had harmed her beloved. Secretly she gets acquainted with Ôki’s son, invites him to Kyoto and seduces him. Then she calls his parents and tells that he had promised to marry her.
Read More »
Hana to hebi / Flower and Snake (1974) Masaru Konuma, Naomi Tani, Nagatoshi Sakamoto, Hijiri Abe, Drama, Erotic
Shizuka is the aristocratic wife of the president of a large company. When she wants to divorce her domineering husband, he orders his employee Yoshi, the son of an adult toy store owner, to train his wife to become sexually submissive. Yoshi has been rendered impotent due to a childhood trauma resulting from his killing a black American soldier who had been having sexual relations with his mother. During the course of his training of the masochist Shizuka, Yoshi recovers from his affliction.
Read More »
Shussho Iwai / The Wolves (1971) Hideo Gosha, Rumi Aiki, Hideyo Amamoto, Noboru Andô, Crime, Drama
Seiji Iwahashi is released early from a 10-year prison sentence for killing the boss of a rival. He returns to find the two rival gangs finalizing a merger. When a pattern of corruption is revealed he can no longer sit back and let it continue.
Read More »
Irezumi (1966) Yasuzô Masumura, Ayako Wakao, Akio Hasegawa, Gaku Yamamoto, Drama
In this elegant proto-feminist shocker from Yasuzo Masumuro, a woman forced into prostitution wreaks her spidery revenge. A mysterious tattoo artist puts his masterpiece, a human-faced spider, on a kidnapped woman’s back. She and her lover are then forced into a conspiracy-born nightmare, where they face the danger of becoming the very evil they seek to escape. With each new bloody incident, the spider’s face seems to redden with ever-growing hunger…
Read More »
Natsu jikan no otonatachi / Happy Go Lucky (1997) Tetsuya Nakashima, Hidaka Yoshitomo, Nagi Noriko, Maki Ishikawa, Drama
Takashi and four of his classmates, fourth-grade students, cannot succeed in doing a back pullover around a horizontal bar. Their gym teacher warns them: they have one week to succeed; if they resign now, then, tomorrow, facing life difficulties, they will always run away and become bums. Furthermore, all five must succeed, if one of them cannot do it, then all of them fail. Takashi is really worried and wonders if he won’t be always the looser who couldn’t succeed in the back pullover bar exercise.
Read More »
Peace (2010) Kazuhiro Sôda, Shiro Hashimoto, Hiroko Kashiwagi, Toshio Kashiwagi, Documentary, Drama, History
What is peace? What is coexistence? And what are the basis for them? PEACE is a visual-essay-like observational documentary, which contemplates these questions by observing the daily lives of people and cats in Okayama city, Japan, where life and death, acceptance and rejection are intermingled.
Read More »
Barber Yoshino / Yoshino’s Barber Shop (2004) Naoko Ogigami, Kazuyuki Asano, Hoshi Ishida, Shinnosuke Miyao, Comedy
In a small town on the countryside, every young boy is forced to have the same bowl-head haircut known as the “Yoshino-gari” hairstyle. Then one day, a drastic change occurs when a transfer student with bleached hair comes from Tokyo.
Read More »
Hateshinaki yokubô / Endless Desire (1958) Shôhei Imamura, Reiji Akitsu, Shinsuke Ashida, Takeshi Katô, Comedy
On August 15, ten years after the Pacific War, five people meet at a station. Their purpose is to dig out a cache of morphine — now worth sixty million yen — that HASHIMOTO, an army medical officer, buried in an air-raid shelter in this city on the day the war ended. The five are: SHIMA, a beautiful woman who claims that she is HASHIMOTO’s younger sister and that her brother is dead; NAKADA, a pharmacist; ONUMA, who owns a Chinese restaurant; YAMAMOTO, a thug; and SAWAI, who says he is a junior high school teacher. But HASHIMOTO originally had only three accomplices — and hid the morphine late at night, so they did not know each other’s identities. There is one person too many in the group, but they do not know whom. A butcher shop now stands over the old air-raid shelter. The five decide to rent a vacant house across the street, and dig a tunnel to the butcher shop.
Read More »