Hisashi Yamanaka

Azusa Akiyama is top of her class, only daughter of a supermarket manager in Los Angeles. Kouhei Takamoto is her classmate, a rough and tumble guitarist for the band Cherry Boys. One day after school, they crash into each other, and fallen electrical lines cause them to switch bodies.

Lonely and love-stricken high-school student Hiroki pursues a girl, but another one mysteriously appears in his life. Is she a figment of his psyche, or is she real?

Ayase Shinsuke, a popular writer of a series of girl novels, visits Otaru, the town he grew up in. He meets a strange boy who calls himself by the author's real name.

9th-graders Kazuo and Kazumi take a tumble at a temple in a small seacoast town in Japan. Through supernatural intervention, their minds and bodies are switched, and the result is a touching and hilarious coming-of-age comedy as they attempt to survive the pressures of junior high school life.

Veteran filmmaker Nobuhiko Obayashi rounds out the second of his two trilogies about his hometown of Onomichi with this film about the budding relationship between a young lad and an eccentric old man. Fifth-grader Yuta (Takuro Atsugi) is a typical city child looking forward to a summer of reading comic books and playing video games. Instead, he is bundled off to his grandparent's house on the Inland Sea. His grandfather, Yuta's parents explain, has been acting strangely as of late -- he eats the offerings in the family altar and once tried to lead attendants at a funeral in a rousing round of calisthenics. Since his mother and father are swamped with work, and his elder sister (Nana Sano) is studying for college entrance exams, Yuta has been asked to look after Grandpa. The old man takes Yuta on a tour of Onomichi, regaling him with 70 years of its history. Along the way, Grandpa slips in and out of the past, increasingly unable to discern between the two.

After his parent's divorce, Kazuo Saito moves with his mother from Onomichi and must leave his girlfriend behind. At his new school, Kazuo is surprised to reunite with his childhood friend Kazumi.

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.

This moving movie depicts the preciousness of life through the interaction between a man with a dark past and a boy battling illness.