Chizuru, the beautiful daughter of a Kyoto restaurant owner, feels trapped by the marriage plans her mother has arranged for her. When an older university professor and longtime admirer of her mother invites her to Tokyo, she sees it as a chance to escape her traditional life. In the city, Chizuru is drawn to a sophisticated businessman and begins searching for independence, romance, and her own identity while uncovering unsettling truths about her family and the people around her.
Shima Iwashita
Chizuru Sasaki
Mitsuko Mori
Sei Sasaki
Nobuko Otowa
Ayako Ogata
Keizō Kawasaki
Ichirō Hasegawa
Ichirō Arishima
Shōzō Ogata
Chieko Baisho
Setsuko Nagashima
Miyuki Kuwano
Mieko Kaneko
Isao Yamagata
Shinkichi Yamaguchi
Hiroyuki Nagato
Nobon Umegaki
Chizuru, the beautiful daughter of a Kyoto restaurant owner, feels trapped by the marriage plans her mother has arranged for her. When an older university professor and longtime admirer of her mother invites her to Tokyo, she sees it as a chance to escape her traditional life. In the city, Chizuru is drawn to a sophisticated businessman and begins searching for independence, romance, and her own identity while uncovering unsettling truths about her family and the people around her.
Because of her past, 17-year-old Rio lives her days filling the emptiness in her heart with money—until one day, she meets a university professor named Kouki and falls in love.
On a quiet street in Helsinki, Sachie has opened a diner featuring rice balls. For a month she has no customers. Then, in short order, she has her first customer, meets Midori, a gangly Japanese tourist, and invites her to stay with her.
In a distinctly contemporary Tokyo that looks backwards to the city’s disappearing past, Yoko is a writer investigating the life of a modernist composer of the 1930s. She is pregnant by a man she does not want to marry and has found a kindred spirit in a used bookstore owner who aids her research.
In post-WWII Osaka, a middle-aged woman is forced to examine her dreary life and marriage when her husband's young and flirtatious cousin arrives for a brief stay to escape an arranged marriage.
This sensuously beautiful film chronicles the activities of four sisters who gather in Kyoto every year to view the cherry blossoms. It paints a vivid portrait of the pre-war lifestyle of the wealthy Makioka family from Osaka, and draws a parallel between their activities and the seasonal variations in Japan.
An American woman is stranded in Tokyo after breaking up with her boyfriend. Searching for direction in life, she trains to be a ramen chef under a tyrannical Japanese master.
Akira Tachibana is a soft-spoken high school student who used to be a part of the track and field club. Working part-time at a restaurant, she finds herself inexplicably falling in love with her manager, a divorced 45-year-old man.
In the outskirts of Tokyo, a poor but close-knit group living on the fringes of society survives through shoplifting and odd jobs. When Osamu and his son take in a neglected young girl, their already fragile existence begins to unravel. As the family grows attached to her, buried secrets surface, forcing them to confront the true meaning of love, belonging, and what makes a family.
A man reflects on the lost love of his youth and his long-ago journey from Taiwan to America as he begins to reconnect with his estranged daughter.
A 21-year-old girl is released from prison, only to deal with the neighborhood gossip about her and family conflicts. She decides to save one million yen, move to where no one knows her and keep repeating the process.