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The country makes an unusual setting for Naruse, known for his city films, and the lyrical, open-air feeling of this color, ’Scope film almost hides the defeat that permeates the story of a woman trying to be independent of her traditional farming family.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 »
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Michio Segawa, whose father is a water bus driver, lives with his father since his mother died, but he doesn’t feel lonely because he has a beloved carrier pigeon called Dede. Soon, Michio gets a new mother. His new mother brings along her younger sister, Emiko. The house suddenly becomes lively, and Michio’s mother is kind to him, but Michio feels strange. When Emiko is on his father’s lap, he can no longer go to his father to get his gloves fixed right away when they get torn, as he used to do. His father also scolds him strangely.Read More »
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Masaki Kobayashi’s six-part magnum opus, The Human Condition, based on Junpei Gomikawa’s postwar novel, bears the imprint of Kobayashi’s tutelage under legendary filmmaker Keisuke Kinoshita at Shochiku’s Ofuna studio, a critical, introspective, and deeply personal account of wartime Japan framed from the perspective of an idealistic everyman (and Kobayashi’s alterego), Kaji (Tatsuya Nakadai). Opening to the ironic image of lovers Kaji and Michiko (Michiyo Aratama) meeting under an archway auspiciously called the Southern Gate of Peace in Manchuria as Imperial troops march in the street, Kobayashi presents an incisive image of 1930s Japanese society that is morally consumed—and ravaged—by increasingly extremist values of militarism, occupation, and nationalism.Read More »
This is the story of Kiyoshi Yoshida, who feels estranged from both parents after his father returns from war. How the boy adapts to life with the virtual stranger his father has become is the film’s focus.A young boy has formed an idealized image of his father, who has yet to be repatriated from Russia. When they finally meet they fail to get along. The boy withdraws more and more into himself, and the picture is concerned with how the two gradually develop a love for each other.Read More »
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Having completed the first year at his new medical practice, a doctor plans to relax on his day off. However, it is not to be: on this hectic day a man just back from the war front visits the doctor with a medical emergency, followed by a woman who claims to have been molested. Then a yakuza arrives to ask the doctor to cut his finger off…Read More »
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Keijiro and Ayako Kono seem like a picture-book upper middle-class family. He is a respected professor and the couple has two amiable children. But the Kono’s domestic siutuation is more complicated than it seems on the surface. The children are actually the illegitimate children of Kono’s long-time mistress, Miho. To compensate for giving up the children, the Konos subsidize a bar which Miho operates.Read More »
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Noriko, 28, is a secretary in a small company in Tokyo. She is a modern young woman but she still lives with her parents, just like her brother, his wife and their two children. She is under great pressure from her family; in fact, it is not reasonable at this age not to have yet married. But the young girl rejoices in her independence. Her boss offers her a good deal of his knowledge but Noriko hesitates until a sort of illumination solves the problem for her, at least…Read More »
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From the pen of Yoshikawa Eiji comes this exciting story. The Naruto Strait separates Tokushima from the islands of Awaji and Honshu. On Tokushima the mad lord dreams of conquest and forges a bloody revolt against the Tokugawa shogunate. A mysterious swordsman named Noriyuki Gennojo has crossed Naruto’s waters to uncover the Awa clan’s secrets. He puts his life on the line after finding a testament of Awa’s secrets, written in blood by a dying man. Joining Noriyuki are a female ninja who loves him, and the beautiful daughter of an enemy who’s sworn to kill him. Awa’s defenders willl stop at nothing to prevent the blood-soaked letter from reaching the shogun.Read More »