Nobuko Otowa

The relationship between a rich young student and his lower class friend changes when they start to live both at a guest house. Both will be attracted towards Iko, the beautiful daughter of their landlady.Read More »

Shusei Tokuda’s starkly realistic novel about a poor girl pressed into becoming a geisha was forcefully adapted by Kaneto Shindo (Onibaba). When Ginko (Nobuko Otowa, Shindo’s wife) falls in love with one of her clients, she is handily rebuffed by the young man’s wealthy family, and left to wander from geisha house to geisha house.Read More »

Written and directed by renowned Japanese filmmaker Kaneto Shindo (Onibaba, Hadaka no shima, Genbaku no ko), “Black Board” tells the story of middle school bullying taken to the point of homicide in this 1986 classic.Read More »

Kaneto Shindô’s 1974 film “My Way” is a throwback to films of his early career and is an exposure of the Japanese government’s mistreatment of the country’s migratory workers. Based on a true story, an elderly women resiliently spends nine months attempting to retrieve her husband’s dead body, fighting government bureaucracy and indifference all along the way.Read More »

Equally successful was Yoshimura’s 1955 The Beauty and the Dragon (Bijo to Kairyu), a period-film in which the famous Kabuki play Narukami was brought throughly up to date. Somewhat in the manner of Henry V, the film opens with a reconstruction of a classical performance of the play, accurately recreating a historical presentation in the proper style; it then moves, as a film, into a more cinematic interpretation. As in the Olivier movie, the acting style shifts from stage technique to cinema technique, and Yoshimura’s aim, like Olivier’s, was not a total reconstruction of the past but the use of a historically literal presentation as means toward something more modern in conception.Read More »

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A morally-suspect and self-serving retainer rashly baits her high-ranking employer, a regional governor, with a salacious story of a former acquaintance and catastrophe ensues.Read More »

Tamiko is a divorced mother with a seriously ill son, struggling to save him and give both a sense of their existence. She lives with her mother and brother, but will marry a man older than her. The dramatic shadow of Hiroshima bombs is always hovering over the fate of the characters.Read More »

The men who surround and torment the young protagonist (demanding teacher, owner of the company that rapes his own daughter, despotic and uncompromising father) are opposed to women (victims of men) as embodiment of salvation.Read More »

When her husband leaves her for a younger woman, a woman plots revenge against him.Read More »