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Keijiro and Ayako Kono seem like a picture-book upper middle-class family. He is a respected professor and the couple has two amiable children. But the Kono’s domestic siutuation is more complicated than it seems on the surface. The children are actually the illegitimate children of Kono’s long-time mistress, Miho. To compensate for giving up the children, the Konos subsidize a bar which Miho operates.Read More »
Yôkihi is a panoramic period romance about the legendarily beautiful and graceful common-born woman loved by the last T’ang Emperor Xuan Zong. The pure love shared by the royal couple is offset by the political turmoil and corruption of the 8th century, as a dynasty breathes its last dying gasps.Read More »
An intellectual couple in a staid and tedious marriage are surprised when the wife’s niece, who has run away from home, turns up unexpectedly to stay with them. Their mundane lives are sent into disarray by the emotional and energetic Ako.Read More »
After finishing what would become his international phenomenon Rashomon, Akira Kurosawa immediately turned to one of the most daring, and problem-plagued, productions of his career. The Idiot, an adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s nineteenth-century masterpiece about a wayward, pure soul’s reintegration into society—updated by Kurosawa to capture Japan’s postwar aimlessness—was a victim of studio interference and, finally, public indifference. Today, this “folly” looks ever more fascinating, a stylish, otherworldly evocation of one man’s wintry mindscape.Read More »
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This landmark film is a brilliant exploration of truth and human weakness. It opens with a priest, a woodcutter, and a peasant taking refuge from a downpour beneath a ruined gate in 12th-century Japan. The priest and the woodcutter, each looking stricken, discuss the trial of a notorious bandit for rape and murder. As the retelling of the trial unfolds, the participants in the crime — the bandit (Toshiro Mifune), the rape victim (Machiko Kyo), and the murdered man (Masayuki Mori) — tell their plausible though completely incompatible versions of the story.Read More »
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A woman brings her injured daughter to the hospital, only to realize that the doctor is the estranged father of her child. Directed by Masahiro Shinoda.Read More »
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Suspense drama about an assassin charged with breaking up a gold smuggling ring, and the contract subsequently purchased against him and his employer.Read More »
“Hashimoto Shinobu wrote the script based on Ishimori Nobuo’s original story, which won prizes including the first Mimei Literature Award. Depicts an Ainu girl and her younger brother living in a Hokkaido kotan (Ainu village), as they overcome discrimination and poverty.”Read More »
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This is the story of Mama, a.k.a. Keiko, a middle-aged geisha who must choose to either get married or buy a bar of her own. Her family hounds her for money, her customers for her attention, and she is continually in debt. The life of a geisha is examined as well as the way in which the system traps and sometimes kills those in it.Read More »