Kyôko Koizumi

A poor samurai and a rich businessman become unlikely friends through the game of go. Yanagida is a masterless samurai who has lost his position because of false accusations, but hasn’t given up his honor. Genbei, an unscrupulous pawnbroker, ends up learning the value of honesty from Yanagida. Yanagida’s daughter Okinu and Genbei’s ward Yakichi also start to grow close. However, during a night of celebration, Yanagida receives a message summoning him to seek revenge – and Genbei loses a large amount of money, for which Yanagida is suspected.Read More »

Teenagers Jun and Ibuki set out to find the psychedelic rock band Exne Kedy.Read More »

A family struggling to live together even with the outrageous behaviors from each family members.Read More »

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Meet the Kyobashis, a model suburban Japanese family. Or are they? In director Toshiaki Toyoda’s skillful examination of contemporary domestic malaise, a mother’s plan for the perfect family initially seems to be working, but we soon learn that her perceived perfection is a lie that each family member chooses to believe at the expense of reality.Read More »

A haunting tale of destiny and life’s unpredictability: an elite bureaucrat, humbled by an incident which ruined his promising career, has a chance encounter with a glamorous hostess, heartbroken by her husband’s death.Read More »

A man continually trying and failing to get his wife to stay dead; a self-absorbed ad agency creative director who comes up with one unworkable inane idea after another; a British hitman who only wants to know everyone’s function in life; and an unfortunate office worker and father whose brain is left scrambled after a stage hypnotist is murdered in mid-performance. Starting off as unrelated plot lines, they intertwine with each other as they continue on their respective ways.Read More »

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After a retreat to the atmospheric and spectral Loft and Retribution that reinforce Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s reputation as a horror filmmaker, Tokyo Sonata continues in the vein of his idiosyncratically personal (and arguably, more interesting), yet equally unsettling films that began with Bright Future. As the film begins, the family patriarch, middle-aged senior administrative manager, Ryuhei (Teruyuki Kagawa) has been notified that the company has outsourced his job to China (where his salary would pay for three language-fluent office workers) and, without portable skills that could be applied to another department, will be immediately laid off from work. Reluctant to tell his family for fear of undermining his authority, Ryuhei continues the pretext of leaving for work with his briefcase each morning, spending his days alternately lining up at a job placement office and a charity lunch service on the park.Read More »

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“To see Tokyo in all it’s wacky and scenic splendor, take a long walk with Tenten (a.k.a. Adrift in Tokyo). The latest from director Miki Satoshi (Insects Unlisted in the Encyclopedia ), Tenten is a brilliantly manic road comedy starring the unbeatable tag team of Odagiri Joe (Tokyo Tower – Mom & Me, and Sometimes Dad) and Miura Tomokazu (The Taste of Tea). Both actors are playing roles they could do in their sleep – prickly middle-ager and slacker student with unfortunate hair – and they bring the exact combination of calm calamity and charismatic craziness the film calls for. In the grand tradition of male bonding road movies, Tenten is just the aimless story of two strange guys walking around Tokyo for a few days and the stranger adventures they encounter – and yet, it’s so much more. Underachieving law student Takemura (Odagiri Joe) – on his eighth year and counting – has racked up quite a sizable debt in the name of higher education. The urgency of his financial situation announces itself in the form of hot-tempered debt collector Fukuhara (Miura Tomokazu), who comes bursting into his apartment one night demanding payment and threatening painful repercussions. Short of hitting it big on pachinko, Takemura has no idea how he can possibly pay back the sum. As the deadline closes in, Fukuhara makes Takemura an unexpected proposition: walk with him from Kichijoji (in western Tokyo) to Kasumigaseki (in central Tokyo), and he’ll pay the indebted student one million yen, enough to cover his debt. Bewildered but in no position to argue, Takemura hits the road with Fukuhara who, it turns out, just killed his wife and wants to turn himself in at a specific police station in Kasumigaseki. Getting there will take some time though, because many wacky people (including Koizumi Kyoko as a club madam) and surprise detours await them on the road in between.”Read More »