Movies: Nobuko Otowa

While her son, Kichi, is away at war, a woman and her daughter-in-law survive by killing samurai who stray into their swamp, then selling whatever valuables they find. Both are devastated when they learn that Kichi has died, but his wife soon begins ...

The world-famous woodblock artist Hokusai (1760-1849), a widower in need of a steady income, lives with his daughter Oei in the house of his friend Bakin....

In the Sengoku period, a woman and her daughter are raped and murdered by soldiers during a time of civil war. Afterwards, a series of samurai returning from the war through that area are found mysteriously dead with their throats torn out. The gover...

The legend of the birth of Shintoism. In Fourth Century Japan, the Emperor's son Ouso expects to succeed his father on the throne, but Otomo, the Emperor's vassal, prefers Ouso's stepbrother, and conspires to have Ouso die on a dangerous mission he h...

A family of four are the sole inhabitants of a small island, where they struggle each day to irrigate their crops....

Shinnosuke is introduced to Shizu as a prospective marriage partner, but he falls in love with her widowed sister Oyu. Convention forbids Oyu to marry because she has to raise her son as the head of her husband's family. Oyu convinces Shinnosuke and ...

Shuji was once a feared member of the Yakuza crime syndicate, but he's reformed his ways, abandoned his old life and left the city for a small coastal fishing town where he's become an honest fisherman....

Shows the devastation caused by the atomic bomb, and by use of a fictional storyline, portrays the struggle of the ordinary Japanese people in dealing with the aftermath....

Japan, February 1868. As the Tokugawa shogunate declines and the power of Emperor Meiji grows, Gonzo, a soldier of the Restoration Army, returns to Sawando, his hometown, to announce the end of tyranny....

A young Japanese-American man arrives at his grandmother's old hometown in Yamaguchi, begins to stay at her family's elite but dysfunctional household, and gets entangled in a sinister plot of murder....

A woman takes revenge on her husband after he leaves her for a younger woman by harassing the couple with unwanted phone calls at night....

A Japanese family is torn apart by the tensions of an avoidable nuclear world war between the superpowers....

The ship Kaijin Maru is left adrift after losing all means of navigation in a storm. The four people on the ship are becoming increasingly desperate as food and water run out....

Genji, the illegitimate offspring of a Japanese potentate, goes by the philosophy of "love 'em and leave 'em" as a matter of course. Only when his heart is broken by Awaji does Genji realizes how much pain he himself has caused....

A story of Japanese writer Kafu Nagai (1879-1959), a man about sixty with a huge reputation of seducer who falls madly in love for a young geisha named Oyuki. Meticulous and smartly dressed, Nagai patiently wrote in his diary his thoughts during many...

The body of Sakai Hatsuko, a woman of 23 who has been slain with a knife, has been found in a forest. Some days later, Ueda Hiroshi, a 19-year-old shipyard worker, is arrested and charged with the murder. At Ueda's trial, a complex story unfolds....

The film is a series of vignettes from Taiji Tonoyama's life and film clips, interspersed with a dialogue to camera by Nobuko Otowa, addressing the camera as if she is addressing Tonoyama himself, recollecting events in his life. The film focuses on ...

Oshima’s magisterial epic, centering on the ambivalent surviving heir of the Sakurada clan, uses ritual and the microcosm of the traditional family to trace the rise and fall of militaristic Japan across several decades....

After her mother runs away from home, Tomoko is raised to be a geisha. One day Tomoko meets her mother in a red-light district in Tokyo and her life deeply gets in trouble....

A Japanese teenager travels to New Caledonia in search of the fabled "island closest to heaven" that her late father had told her about....