Strange Tale of Oyuki / Bokuto kitan (1992)

A middle-aged man with an umbrella walks down a crowded alley in the Tamanoi area during the thirties. As rain begins, a young woman asks for shelter under his umbrella. She invites him into her place to dry his clothes and offers him tea and then herself, for she is, like the other women 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 …

Breakout / Ikidomari no banka (1988)

A year before Takeshi Kitano's Violent Cop appeared, Breakout introduces to Japan the good bad cop who had already become a clichéd but still standard figure in western movies and TV since introduced by Dirty Harry in 1971. Until its downbeat ending, the movie hits so many of the American clichés that I had to …

Bumpkin Soup / Excitement of the Do-Re-Mi-Fa Girl / Blood of the Do-Re-Me-Fa Girl Roars / Do-re-mi-fa musume no chi wa sawagu (1985)

The country girl Akiko appears at a university campus in search of Yoshioka, the boy she has determined to marry (apparently because he took her virginity) and wanders into not a world of study but of continuously weird behavior. As she says, it's more like a constant festival or circus than a school. Yoshioka hasn't …

His Motorbike, Her Island / Kare no otobai kanojo no shima (1986)

His Motorbike, Her Island accomplishes the seemingly impossible. Combining a showcase for not one but two of Kadokawa’s girl “pop idols,” the introduction of a young male to potentially join them as a teen idol, a teen-romance story line, a Japanese ghost story, and a 90-minute ad for Kawasaki, Obayashi somehow also managed to make …

Search for the Black Pearl / Underwear Inspection / Chikan densha: Shitagi kensatsu (1984)

One of the public problems in Japanese society for decades has been women being groped in the over-crowded subways and trains,* particularly in Tokyo, so it should come as no surprise that pinku films should take up the subject. The result was some 23 movies made by Shintoho Eiga, Nikkatsu’s principal competitor in the genre, …

Typhoon Club / Taifu kurabu (1985)

Set in the days of a typhoon reaching shore, Typhoon Club uses the storm as a metaphor for the confusions and chaos of early teen life. The result, like a typhoon itself, is dramatic but also confused and confusing to the viewer. Much of this confusion results simply because we have eight principal characters, all …

Most Dangerous Game / Games of Maximum Risk / Mottomo kiken na yugi (1978)

In The Most Dangerous Game, the action movie is reduced to its pure essence – action with hardly a break except for our hero to get drunk while he recovers absurdly quickly from a gunshot wound. Barring that brief pause, we have beatings, gun battles, rape, lots of running, some more gun battles, the most …

Beast in the Shadows / Edogawa Rampo no injû (1977)

One of the most unexpected and generally unknown aspects of Japanese movies in the seventies was the revival of the murder mystery as a top of the bill feature. That examples of this genre are all but unseen in Europe or America is no surprise, of course, since every nation produced plenty of those in …

Take Care, Red Riding Hood / Akazukinchan kiotsukete (1970)

Kauro is a high school graduate trying to decide what to do with his life. He has a childhood sweetheart that he keeps breaking up with and then getting back together. It is assumed that he will go on to Tokyo University like his two brothers and become a lawyer, which he sees as a …