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

Two female truck drivers detest each other, and try to steal each other's business. Their rigs are both painted with elaborate large pictures of beautiful naked women. One day, whilst hauling loads of fish in Hokkaido, they are separately stopped by traffic police, who impound their trucks for various violations. About this time, one of the women meets a handsome man, with whom romance is a possibility. Then, the women discover they have been tricked. The cops were connected with the Russian mafia, who intend to ship their trucks offshore and sell them.

The culturally isolated, nomadic Seburi people of western Japan are the subject of this tragedy about a few of the community's members who especially experience difficulties as modern Japan encroaches on their world. The setting is World War II, and conflicts have already arisen when the military police come to take Seburi men away into the army. Still following their own customs that can be harsh at times, and are particularly cruel to women (women must give birth alone and unaided, a woman's adultery is punished by burying her up to her neck in the earth and then leaving her for days), the Seburi are mainly treated with fear and animosity by the non-Seburi townspeople of the region. Along with the hardships arising from cultural clashes, nature's own vagaries present other challenges to the Seburi -- who still lived in tents until the 1950s. Winter avalanches and snowstorms cause as much havoc as the tensions engendered by the slow encroachment of the modern world.

A former yakuza returns to gangster life after an old enemy threatens his son.

A working class young man, Tetsuo, who distrusts all rich people, falls in love with a girl, Chika, from an affluent family. He has a difficult time, but love survives despite the problems.

Two childhood friends find themselves caught in the midst of an all-out turf war between rival factions in the yakuza-stained region of Kyushu.