A young dockworker who owes his life to his boss becomes embroiled in union activity on the Yokohama waterfront. The rebel Saburo works as an errand boy for a shipping company and vents his frustrations by plucking on the guitar.

A vengeful contractor hires a series of young killers to target a woman muckraker. Trouble brews when an amateur marksman shows up his eclectic competition.

A blind traveling musician is abused and oppressed wherever she goes, even as the modern world imposes change around her.

Seeking revenge against the guard who tormented him, a young man returns to the island where he was imprisoned in reform school. But his plans for vengeance are disturbed when he encounters a strange and beautiful young woman.

When the man who seduced the famous painter Otoko as a teenager — and then wrote a bestselling novel about it — reappears in her life, her pupil — and lesbian lover — hatches a plot to destroy the man and his family.

When a lone traveler stumbles upon a remote, drought-stricken village, he finds himself engulfed in a whirlpool of myth, mystery, and magic: in a nearby pond reside spirits who hold the fate of the town’s inhabitants, including lovers Akira and Yuri, in their hands.

The myth of the Sun Goddess who founded Japanese society is seen through the lens of a modern view of history.

Follows a young med student's relationships with two women: a dangerous affair with a childhood friend and his mother's struggle to rebuild their estranged relationship.

Successful and married with children, paper-mill owner Jihei knows better than to contradict the strict social and moral codes of 18th-century Japan. But when he meets the lovely courtesan Koharu, he becomes a man obsessed. Koharu returns his love, even foregoing other customers while Jihei schemes to somehow buy her freedom. His efforts yield ruinous consequences for his business and his family life, and Koharu is meanwhile purchased by another client.

A gangster gets released from prison and has to cope with the recent shifts of power between the gangs, while taking care of a thrill-seeking young woman, who got in bad company while gambling.

A mountain man beheads his many wives to prove his love to an alluring woman he meets in an enchanted forest.

The tragic story of Gonza, a handsome ladies man, set in the Tokagawa Period, a time in which appearences are very important. Gonza competes with Bannojō for the honor to perform the tea ceremony to celebrate the birth of an heir to the lord of their clan. To see the sacred tea scrolls Gonza promises to marry the daughter of the family which possesses them, even though he is unofficially engaged to another. When studying the scrolls with Osai, the mother of the house, Bannojō sneaks into the house and steals their obis and runs through the town proclaiming the two as adulterers.

In 1863, when American warships approach Japan, an enigmatic ronin becomes an important figure in a complex game of power between the Shogunate and the empire.

As the great military commander Nobunaga Oda was consolidating his power across Japan, one of his actions was to wipe out a clan of assassins, killing every man, woman and child he found in the village. Years later, one of the survivors has hired a young but skilled assassin to avenge the deaths of his friends and family. His mission: to sneak into the most heavily guarded castle in Japan, and kill the supreme ruler of the country.

Two Jesuit priests encounter persecution when they travel to Japan in the 17th century to spread Christianity and search for their mentor.

Years of warfare end in a Japan unified under the Tokugawa shogunate, and samurai spy Sasuke Sarutobi, tired of conflict, longs for peace. When a high-ranking spy named Tatewaki Koriyama defects from the shogun to a rival clan, however, the world of swordsmen is thrown into turmoil. After Sasuke is unwittingly drawn into the conflict, he tracks Tatewaki, while a mysterious, white-hooded figure seems to hunt them both. By tale’s end, no one is who they seemed to be, and the truth is far more personal than anyone suspected. Director Masahiro Shinoda’s Samurai Spy, filled with clan intrigue, ninja spies, and multiple double crosses, marks a bold stylistic departure from swordplay film convention.