Fudeko Tanaka

1981 Japanese film based on the novel by Naoshiro Yoshimoto.

A tragic love story between a prostitute and a young trainee monk.

7/10

A man whose son has been murdered pushes to create laws to financially protect victims' families.

6.7/10

Roman Porno from 1975.

In this retelling of an infamous unsolved heist, a couple tries to outlast the statute of limitations after successfully stealing 300 million yen.

Story of the last three days in the life of Sakamoto Ryoma (1836-1867), imperial loyalist who tried to unite the Choshu and Satsuma clans and prepared the way for the Meiji Restoration (1868).

6.5/10

A young woman fails her university entrance exam and starts shoplifting.

5.9/10

Minoru visits his home on Okinoerabu island for the first time in thirty years. Seeing the old man who used to be in love with his mother, Minoru recalls the old days spent on the island with his young, beautiful mother.

6/10

In postwar Japan, an editor visits her old Professor who is working on a modern translation of a legend about a mummified Buddhist monk who was revived, only to turn into a sex fiend that terrorized a rural village in pre-modern Japan. The story begins to have uncanny resonances with things going on in the present.

6.1/10

Matsu, known to the prisoners as Scorpion, is locked away in the bowels of the prison as revenge for disrupting the smooth operation of the prison and for her disfiguring attack on the warden. Granted a one day reprieve due to the visit of a dignitary, she takes advantage and attacks the warden again. This leads to more brutal punishment and humiliation. But the punishment gives her an oppurtunity to escape along with six other female prisoners. Their surreal flight from prison pits the convicts against the guards, the warden and each other.

7.1/10

Conditions have been better for the nameless protagonist: his grandmother is a shoplifter and his war criminal father and sister have an unhealthy, intimate relationship with the family rabbit.

8/10

About an establishment where old men pay to sleep besides young girls that had been narcotized and happen to be naked, the sleeping beauties. The old men are expected to take sleeping pills and share the bed for a whole night with a girl without attempting anything of bad taste like putting a finger inside their mouths.

7.1/10

Ayako, a young woman from a rural fishing village is sold by her family into a brothel when her father takes ill. There she quickly is stripped of her innocence and illusions.

6.9/10

Struggling with his true emotions, dreams, memories of the past and the reality Shizuo is about to marry, but is torn between his wife-to-be and the love to his mother.

7.3/10

While her son, Kichi, is away at war, a woman and her daughter-in-law survive by killing samurai who stray into their swamp, then selling whatever valuables they find. Both are devastated when they learn that Kichi has died, but his wife soon begins an affair with a neighbor who survived the war, Hachi. The mother disapproves and, when she can't steal Hachi for herself, tries to scare her daughter-in-law with a mysterious mask from a dead samurai.

8/10
8.3%

A touching story of a girl who sails away from her love to keep her family together.

Joe Shishido is an ambitious bike racetrack tout who becomes inadvertently involved in a triangle with a vulnerable prostitute (Izumi Ashikawa) and her brutal yakuza pimp (George Ai).

6.8/10

Tajima Yumi, in grade school, is overjoyed when her father says they are moving to an apartment in a big city. But the beautiful home she had imagined is in a slum area called Samurai Village, a little settlement, where people live from hand to mouth. To make things worse, a group of vagrants descends on the already crowded ragpickers' village. The sight depresses and saddens little Yumi, but when her father gives up drinking, it makes up for everything in her eyes, and when he runs past liquor shops to avoid temptation, Yumi's laughter rings out merrily again. A unique social drama depicting the growth of a new generation that confronts the world of adults full of vanity in the image of a girl living in poverty.

One of Sayuri Yoshinaga's first leading roles.

Keisuke and Shizuko grew up by the Kitakami river and came to fall in love before they knew it. Eighteen years ago, Shizuko was left an orphan and was taken in by Keisuke's parents, who had raised her as their own child. At the riverside when the cherry blossoms are falling, Keisuke, now enrolled in university, promises Shizuko that he will tell his parents about them at the start of the summer vacation. He then sets off for Tokyo...

Maki, a porter at the Sakura Hotel, finds a body in Room No. 2 and picks up a piece of paper on which is written "one-third of the key", also the part of a key. From a newspaper he learns that the dead man is an official who has been detained as a suspect in a bribery case involving 150,000,000 yen and that another suspect named Matsunaga is still in custody. Maki realizes that if he can obtain the other two-thirds of the key, he will be a multi-millionaire.

The young Takako Kuramoto has come to Tokyo to study and starts working for the rich Tashiro family as tutor of the daughter, Kumiko, while she receives attention from her two older brothers, Yukichi and Shinji. Meanwhile, the exact parentage of Shinji comes to light.

7.3/10

Nobuo is a hot-headed hoodlum fresh out of reform school who struggles to make a clean break with his tearaway past.

6.4/10

Haruki Murakami is a successful family man and the head of a camera company. Unbeknownst to Murakami, his arrogant son oscillates between a mistress and a new lover who sings at a nightclub. When Murakami’s disabled daughter befriends the mistress, the affair throws the family into turmoil.

7.2/10

A jobless young couple, Yoshigi and Tsutue, wind up at the outskirts of the Suzaki red-light district in Tokyo. Tsutue talks her way into a job pouring sake for male customers at a small bar run by a sympathetic older woman, while Yoshigi is shunted off into a nearby noodle shop, where he gets a job delivering noodles. Tsutue charms and runs off with one of her clients. Yoshigi, ignoring the attentions of a sweet co-worker, pursues Tsutue.

7.4/10

Japanese drama film.

Japanese drama film.

A group of Okinawan high school girls are drafted as nurses during the American invasion of the island. As the enemy army advances further, the situation for the girls becomes increasingly desperate as food and shelter run out and the number of injured climbs, leading to the film's tragic finale.

7.1/10

Five women classmates from a college in Tokyo are on the first stretch of a walking tour when one of them, Masako, falls ill at a railway station. Osen, a middle-aged maid from a nearby inn, takes her in and nurses her, assisted by Dr. Minami, a young physician who diagnoses her illness as a mild case of pneumonia. With Masako in good hands and needing a few days to recuperate, her classmates continue their tour. Masako’s recovery, however, is hampered by her spoiled and immature nature and her determination to punish the world for the loss of her mother.

6.8/10

Slice of life film centered around a couple of years in the life of a rural high school girl.

7.3/10

A comedy about two salarymen who routinely degrade themselves for their boss.

6.6/10

After learning that he has accidentally killed a man in a fight, Unokichi must look after the man's pregnant widow.

A small community in wartime Japan learn how to make do with less.

7.3/10
10%

A story of a servant girl whose life is upturned by her doomed love for a spineless young man.

6.6/10