Yûzô Kawashima

The relationships between the hostesses and the customers who visit a typical city bar.Read More »

When Yumiko Tsuyama, a potter by profession, comes inquiring about a room for rent in an old mansion overlooking Osaka, she finds a bizarre collection of characters already living there. The unlikely leader of this menagerie is Yoda Goro, who speaks four languages fluently, is an expert in cabbage rolls, and has written how-to books encompassing every aspect of human existence.Read More »

Married for a decade, a couple have no child. He is a lawyer, however, and as a result of one of his cases has the daughter of an imprisoned man living with them. The girl, who is understated, has a boyfriend, but otherwise only ventures out to meet her jailed father. The family is visited by the daughter of a friend from Osaka who has made the journey without informing her parents. That her personality is the opposite of the girl who lives in the house is obvious. At the same time, the wife runs into her own ex and the husband faints at work due to exhaustion. The live-in girl tends to the husband in a way that leaves the latter’s wife concerned.Read More »

Set in the postwar turmoil, Akasaka no shimai paints a vivit portrait of the life of three sisters who struggle to live in Tokyo.Read More »

Comedy of manners set on the “Kodama” train between Tokyo and Osaka, before the opening of the Shinkansen. In the leading role, Frankie Sakai plays a straightforward but indecisive hero. The passengers also include the bubbly Dan Reiko, and Ozawa Eitaro as a dour company president. Based on the novel “Seven and a half hours”, by Shishi Bunroku.Read More »

Synopsis:
Set in the last few years of the shogun’s rule, this period/ensemble movie depicts the lives of the young and the restless at a whorehouse. The protagonist is Saheiji, a resourceful, witty free spirit. It’s 1862, 6 years before the Shogun turned his political power over to the Emperor. Penniless Saheiji splashes out at a famous Shinagawa whorehouse. He’s forced to stay on at the whorehouse to repay his debt. At first Saheiji is regarded as an unwelcome guest who never leaves but it turns out he is not just a poor grifter. None of the whorehouse’s guests, hosts, servants and attending ladies are innocent but they are pragmatic schemers. Saheiji soon endears himself to them all and solves many whorehouse disputes with his wit. But it is slowly revealed that the seemingly perfect Saheiji is suffering from tuberculosis and his future is uncertain…Read More »

Yusaku, whose nickname is “Tonkatsu Taisho” (General Pork Cutlet), is a popular young children’s doctor. Mayumi, a female doctor of another hospital, plans to expand her clinic with the advice of a lawyer named Oguro by destroying small houses. Oguro, however, plans to take advantage of Mayumi’s plan and build a cabaret instead.Read More »

Synopsis:
Satoko is a mistress by trade, or fate: when her master, the silkscreen artist of the Kohoan Temple in Kyoto, dies, she is given to the temple’s lascivious head priest Kikuchi. She is drawn to a melancholy young acolyte, Jinen, who has observed the profligacy of his cruel master and Satoko’s utter dependence on the man. Jinen is both fascinated and disturbed by Satoko’s interest in him; he is similarly caught between loathing of Kikuchi and of the dark circumstances of his birth and his own moral weakness. The story unfolds in a dreamlike manner, a flashback inspired by a now-infamous image on a silkscreen in the souvenir shop at the so-called Temple of the Wild Geese.Read More »

A woman and her daughter are in love with the same man, a chef at the restaurant that the mother manages. He is slightly crippled from frostbite in his years in Siberian labor camps and considers himself “already dead.”Read More »