Itsuro Shimoda

When it rains it pours. Kenji divorced his wife, lost his job and his old squeeze Naoko is getting married back home in the north of Japan, specifically in Akita. He returns there in order to attend her wedding. Naoko surprises him by proposing that they have sex again. The one night stand is the new beginning.

A 40-something disillusioned novelist, Yazoe, haunted by a failed marriage and a crippling personal secret, navigates hollow affairs with a courtesan named Chieko while projecting his emotional void onto the protagonists of his love novels—until an accidental encounter with a naive college student, Noriko Seyawa, unravels his guarded solitude, forcing him to confront his fear of intimacy and the buried trauma shaping his twisted philosophy on love.

An experimental, psychedelic odyssey through Japanese subculture experienced via the eyes of a disillusioned young man, who must contend with intense familial dysfunction, psychosexual alienation, and existentialist malaise.

In suburban Tokyo in 1945, years of war and concentrated air raids by US forces have left the city in tatters and the population poor, tired, and hungry. The 19-year-old Satoko and her mother bide their time working nominal jobs and trying to stave off hunger. A displaced aunt turns up looking for shelter, but she is just another hungry mouth to feed. Satoko is becoming a woman and is drawn to the only eligible man in the neighborhood. This is a decidedly quiet film that focuses on a single character and her survival in dire circumstances in the spring of her life.

A group of four friends and lovers in their forties recall their past intimacies while trying to build new ones.

A young drifter and a precocious sixteen years old girl slowly form a bond in a small town haunted by its wartime past.

A young couple lives together in a small apartment and struggles to keep their relationship together, despite inertia and financial hardship. Based on the comic Red Colored Elegy by Seiichi Hayashi.