Chikamatsu Monogatari
"The tortured heart behind the cultivated image."
"The tortured heart behind the cultivated image."
A young salaryman and his wife struggle within the confines of their passionless relationship while he embarks on an extramarital affair.
Dolls takes puppeteering as its overriding motif, which relates thematically to the action provided by the live characters. Chief among those tales is the story of Matsumoto and Sawako, a young couple whose relationship is about to be broken apart by the former's parents, who have insisted their son take part in an arranged marriage to his boss' daughter.
The arranged marriage between a capricious woman from Tokyo high society and a quiet rustic man is tested by a marital crisis.
Widower Shuhei Hirayama's caretaker is his 24-year-old daughter, Michiko. Gradually, he comes to realize that Michiko should not be obliged to look after him for the rest of his life, so he arranges a marriage for her.
An unhappy young woman from an abusive family is married off to a fearsome and chilly army commander. But the two learn more about each other, love may have a chance.
It was a pre-destined love and marriage for Sonoko and Tetsuo. They tied the knot and became husband and wife no questions asked. All is well then. Well, perhaps not. Each holds a secret that even the binds of matrimony cannot untie.
A Yokohama shoe executive faces a wrenching choice when kidnappers mistakenly seize his chauffeur’s son but demand the ransom anyway.
A car accident and shifting affections test the bond between a married couple.
A novelist is blinded in a car crash that killed his wife and several years later rediscovers his passion for life and writing when he embarks on an affair with the neglected wife of an indicted businessman.
Mei Tachibana is a high school student. Due to a traumatic incident when she was a kid, Mei has been unable to make friends or have boyfriends. By mistake, Mei then injures the most popular male student named Yamato Kurosawa. Somehow, Yamato Kurosawa likes Mei Tachibana and tells everyone unilaterally that Mei is his friend. One day, Yamato Kurosawa saves Mei Tachibana from a stalker by kissing her. From that kiss, their love story begins.
An unexpected love triangle, a seduction trap, and a random encounter are the three episodes, told in three movements to depict three female characters and trace the trajectories between their choices and regrets.
Residents of a rundown boardinghouse in 19th-century Japan, including a mysterious old man and an aging actor, get drawn into a love triangle that turns violent. When amoral thief Sutekichi breaks off his affair with landlady Osugi to romance her younger sister, Okayo, Osugi extracts her revenge by revealing her infidelity to her jealous husband.
Returning to their lord's castle, samurai warriors Washizu and Miki are waylaid by a spirit who predicts their futures. When the first part of the spirit's prophecy comes true, Washizu's scheming wife, Asaji, presses him to speed up the rest of the spirit's prophecy by murdering his lord and usurping his place. Director Akira Kurosawa's resetting of William Shakespeare's "Macbeth" in feudal Japan is one of his most acclaimed films.
In the years before World War II, a penniless Japanese child is torn from her family to work as a maid in a geisha house.
Two outsiders, both shaped by the circumstances that have brought them together, forge a deep and lasting love.
Pregnant out of wedlock, an educated young woman is pressured by her father into an arranged marriage with a lonely farmer in this drama set during WWII.
Kai—an outcast—joins Oishi, the leader of 47 outcast samurai. Together they seek vengeance upon the treacherous overlord who killed their master and banished their kind. To restore honour to their homeland, the warriors embark upon a quest that challenges them with a series of trials that would destroy ordinary warriors.
In postwar Tokyo, Noriko lives with her extended family. Although she enjoys her career and her social life, her more traditional family worries about her single marital status at the advanced age of 28. 40-year-old business associate Takako proposes, Noriko's family press her into accepting, but when her widowed childhood friend Kenkichi returns to the neighborhood, she finds her heart leading in another direction.
In middle school, Futaba Yoshioka was madly in love with Tanaka Kou but he moves away with his mother. She is reunited with him later in life but he is not the same person anymore.
A married farmer falls under the spell of a slatternly woman from the city, who tries to convince him to drown his wife.
