Masatoshi Nagase

Part One of the Maiku Hama Private Eye Trilogy
Detective Maiku “Mike” Hama (Masatoshi Nagase; Mystery Train) navigates the Yokohama underworld with razor sharp threads, Belmondo cool and two-fisted street savvy. But when he comes to the aid of a Taiwanese waiter at a local mah-jongg parlor, the unflappable Hama has no idea what he’s in for. Though seemingly a luckless immigrant teetering on the threshold of Yokohama’s gutter, Hama’s Taiwanese client holds the secret to a ferocious gangland revenge triangle that soon has bullets, fists and severed fingers flying. Hama’s plunge into a dizzyingly escalating, brutally violent multiethnic gang war ultimately snares him in a web of revenge and deceit that spans continents and severs bloodlines.Read More »

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O-Shin is a young brothel worker who, one night, helps a young samurai escape from his pursuers. Against the warnings of her fellow workers, particularly Kikuno and the brothel’s owner, O-Shin falls in love with the samurai.Read More »

Synopsis:
Mike Hama is a private investigator who has been reduced to combing the mean streets of the Yokohama waterfront on a borrowed bicycle.Read More »

Nagase is a young man on a train, apparently deciding at random where to go. As he walks out of a train station, he bumps into a woman, Nami. He is immediately fascinated by her, and follows her to the estate agent’s office where she works.

At the office her boss and husband, Hideki, invites him inside. He rents an apartment and asks for a job. Although Nami tells her husband that she has a certain feeling about Nagase, he is given a job.Read More »

One of seven new films in a series–called the “Asian Beat” series–which revolve around the exotic adventures of a young Japanese hero, Tokio.Read More »

A violent, guitar-playing, electrically charged boxer faces off against an electronic wizard half-merged with a metallic Buddha.Read More »

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54 high school girls throw themselves in front of a subway train. This appears to be only the beginning of a string of suicides around the country. Does the new all-girl group Desert have anything to do with it? Detective Kuroda tries to find the answer, which isn’t as simple as one could hope.Read More »

When a woman whose job is to professionally date men disappears suddenly a TV crew who wanted to film a documentary about women like her begin searching for her. Coincidentally, a salaryman who saw the disappeared woman and wants to meet her again is found and joins the crew.Read More »

Quote:
Kanjaki, a middle-aged man, goes to a quiet countryside village. He puts his helmet on a shrunken old woman whom he meets by chance in a shop. As soon as he presses the buttons on the helmet one by one, she suddenly remembers forgotten happy moments and is rejuvenated. This is just the beginning. Kanjaki goes on to make the village people recall their happy pasts, but his face is lined with worry and a sadness that deepens. What is the secret of this helmet? And what is he trying to do with it? Director Sabu’s Happiness suggests happiness and suffering are intertwined through the unusual scenario of a helmet reminding people of the happiest moments of their lives. Sabu convincingly portrays the notion that memory is the source of both happiness and suffering, and how memory affects our lives.Read More »