Acting
The scene is set in the year 1944, wartime Fukuoka, Japan. The Japanese Imperial Army are cornered. They decided to send students to the battlefield. On his way home from a draft check, Kanji, who is hiding his gayness, agonizes over whether he should declare his feelings for his friend Sakunosuke, who is leaving for the front lines tomorrow.
Sakurai Mieko, unable to forget her ex-boyfriend Ueki Hiroshi, is visited by an alien named Inuzuka Chako. Chako's goal is to bring back Hiroshi, the alien who has made women all over the universe cry, to her home planet. Mieko, Chako, and Mieko's fiancé, Ishibashi Kazuyuki, embark on a journey to find Hiroshi…
"Puruncho," a drink that's all the rage, is the subject of a new story. Yukiko, invited by her friend Shinko, joins the Anti-Puruncho Alliance, a group advocating for the abolition of Puruncho. Yukiko's "Anti-Puruncho Alliance Theme" is sung loudly during the demonstrations. However, pressure from the establishment suppresses their movement. Gradually cornered, the group begins to collapse from within...
Mori, a musician struggling with the distance between himself and his wife Maiko, a photographer, has an unexpected reunion with his former friend Asako. This encounter rekindles a love that had long since passed between them. However, their memories diverge, and recollections colored by expectations and desires emerge blurred, distorted, and conveniently rewritten within each of them. And at the end of a long walk, Mori and Asako come to reexamine their two lives that have already strayed from their paths, and the present moment where each of them now stands.
Shining Whale
As he wanders a derelict factory in a slum, 70-year-old Yoshifumi Ishibashi encounters ghosts and places from his past as a 15-year-old boy wielding an 8mm camera who was taken into the bosom of an underground theatre troupe in the turbulent era of the 60s.
