Shinsuke Suzuki
Little Towa lives with his parents Satsuki and Yuichi in a coastal town on Nagashima. Yuichi is a fisherman, Satsuki runs a restaurant. What Towa doesn’t know is that he is adopted. As a baby, he was abandoned in an internet café, completely emaciated. While his new parents are secretly fighting for custody of him and want to protect him from his past, the family’s happiness begins to falter. Satsuki and Yuichi aren’t the only ones who are worried about Towa’s future.
Yumi is a victim when the triple disaster of an earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown occur in Japan of 2011. She is a guest of her aunt now. She finds a job at a local bar and works under the owner Sugiya, a man who has amnesia and barely recalls anything except his recipes. The two begin to develop feelings for one another.
In Mahoro, the fictional suburb of Tokyo, Tada works as a general problem solver for hire. One day, former classmate Gyoten appears unannounced. Both men are over 30 years old and divorced. With no explanation, Gyoten suddenly asks to spend the night at Tada's home. Eventually, Tada accepts Gyoten as his assistant and together they become involved in various cases concerning an assortment of people from different walks of life.
For his fourth full feature, Toyoshi Toyoda has abandoned the theme of the angry young man, examined in depth in Pornostar, Blue Spring and 9 Souls. Kuchu Teien is, on the face of it, more a drama, a character study, than a typical Toyoda genre flick. Yet within this beautifully structured and photographed film, there lies a dark soul. Ostensibly the story of a happy family, it becomes increasingly clear as the movie progresses that the Kyobashis are anything but. Despite a family agreement that they are all open with each other, the entire household knows the opposite is true.
