After the Rain / Ame agaru (1999)

Ihei is a wandering ronin who has been done in over the years by his own good nature. He and his wife find themselves stranded at an inn as the river they want to cross is flooded. He enters a prize-fight and uses the prize money for food and drink for all the people in …

Heat Wave / Kagero (1991)

As the modern yakuza were returning to the big screen around 1990, the period yakuza also re-appeared in Kagero. Rin saw her gambler father murdered after he was caught cheating. She is adopted by the Kosugi family, who run a large “restaurant,” as the subtitles have it, and who have just given birth to a …

Yoshiwara Fire / Tokyo Bordello / Yoshiwara Enjo (1987)

Yoshiwara Fire gives us our most complete look at the life inside a pleasure house since World of Geisha, and the most detailed look at the individuals inside them since Street of Shame. It is also a fabulously lush film, glorying in its reds, purples, and golds of the women’s formal wear, contrasted with the …

Spirit of Tattoo / Irezumi: Sekka tomuraizashi (1982)

Unrelated to the earlier Irezumi, Takabayashi’s Spirit of Tattoo is as its title suggests a meditation on the tattoo as both an art and a mystical experience. The situation is simple: Akane, now in her thirties, is the secretary and apparently long-time lover of Fujieda, a forty-ish librarian with a fetish about tattoos and women’s …

Kai (1985)

Iwago is a broker who buys and sells young girls in and around Kochi. He buys Kiku to save her from being sold to China where her liver will be harvested for medicines and spontaneously decides she will belong to his own house as a daughter. He later buys Somemayu to resell to the local …

Geisha / Yokiro (1983)

Yokiro is the name of the geisha house in which much of the story is set. This is an enormous house, supposedly 200 geisha, in the small town of Kochi on the eastern side of Shikoku, itself the poorest of Japan’s four main islands. It is an independent geisha house, under the control of no …

At This Late Date, the Charleston / Chikagoro naze ka Charusuton (1981)

Even by the eighties, the war had not faded from Japanese consciousness and there was still a great deal of survivor’s guilt, which Okamoto manages to turn into the often hilarious At This Late Date, the Charleston. After an attempted rape, Jiro, the second son of a wealthy family, is thrown into a jail cell …

Yellow Handkerchief / Shiawase no kiiroi hankachi (1977)

Kin’ya gets dumped by his girlfriend and so he buys himself a car and takes off driving, Arriving off the ferry in Hokkaido, and not wishing to look like a “hick,” he buys himself a cowboy hat and hangs around the train station offering rides to any young women passing by. Eventually, Akemi takes him …

Scandalous Adventures of Buraikan / Buraikan (1970)

The American release title of Buraikan is a bit deceptive, suggesting one single central character. In fact we have three major characters, only connected to each other by the slenderest of threads. First we see Naojiro (Tatsuya Nakadai), a neer-do-well ronin who wants to be an actor and who tries to seduce passing beauties by …

Kill! / Kiru (1968)

Starting from the same story on which Kurosawa built Sanjuro, Kihachi Okamoto’s Kiru throws everything from sixties chanbara into the pot and stirs it all up into a unique and arguably great film. What could easily have resulted in a derivative mess, a pale imitation, or a Mel Brooks parody instead comes out as an …