The Fencing Master tells the story of a man trying to survive as the only world he knows is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Danpei Ichikawa lives for swordfighting – he was once a renowned kabuki swordfight choreographer, and as the Chairman of the New National Theatre Company, he wants nothing more than to choreograph the swordfights for the modern plays put on by the company.

Tradition and modernity clash when a young woman inherits a sweet-making firm in Kyoto.

Kikuji is the scion of an Osaka merchant family whose traditional power is matrilineal. Instructed by his overbearing mother and grandmother to give them an heiress for the family business, he stands by helplessly as his wife is thrown out of the house for producing a son. Driven to a life of dissipation - his mistresses also fail to produce daughters - in the end he is just too tired to care.

The lives of a family of kelp (kombu) merchants in Osaka across three generations, spanning from the Meiji era through the aftermath of World War II.

Satoko is a mistress by trade or fate: when her master, the silkscreen artist of the Kohoan Temple in Kyoto, dies, she is given to the temple's lascivious head priest Kikuchi. She is drawn to a melancholy young acolyte, Jinen, who has observed the profligacy of his cruel master and Satoko's utter dependence on the man. Jinen is both fascinated and disturbed by Satoko's interest in him; he is similarly caught between loathing of Kikuchi and of the dark circumstances of his birth and his own moral weakness. The story unfolds in a dreamlike manner—a flashback inspired by a now-infamous image on a silkscreen in the souvenir shop at the so-called Temple of the Wild Geese.

A young man who followed his father's wishes and became a travel actor causes a big commotion with his fellow members of the Gurentai group during their travel destination! Innocent to cute girls and reckless to bad guys! Exciting entertainment!

About small-time gangster Asakichi's chaotic life in the 1930s. His gambling addiction means that he must not continue working in the family business. Instead he supports himself by arranging cockfights. He becomes ex-geisha Okinu's patron and lover, and falls directly into disfavor with the yakuza.

One day, a funeral was held at one of the tenements in Asakusa.
It was the only son of a wealthy merchant named Matasaburo, who had run away from home with a woman he was in love with and had been living here.
But this funeral was actually a kyogen (a farce) orchestrated by a gardener named Yunosuke, who had planted it without telling his wife, Okinu, in order to bilk his parents out of their money.
Matasaburo believed Yunosuke, who said he would dig him up right away, and was buried in the ground. ......

A tea master and his daughter Ogin are both Christians in feudal Japan. Ogin falls in love with a married feudal prince who shares her faith. When the Shogun bans Christianity, the situation worsens.