Japanese Films

Sisters of the Gion (祇園の姉妹) is a 1936 film by Kenji Mizoguchi that tells the story of two sisters working as geisha in the pleasure district of Gion, Kyoto. Exploring a common theme of Japanese films of that era, Mizoguchi shows us a struggle to make ends meet, as the sisters have fallen on hard times and are both without a patron. The older sister has been trained as a geisha in the traditional way, and so believes her role entails always taking a backseat to men. The young

Afraid to Die (からっ風野郎, or A Man Blown by the Wind ) is a raunchy potboiler of a yakuza movie directed by Yasuzo Masumura and starring Yukio Mishima in the lead role. Mishima’s character, Takeo, a yakuza member, is released from prison after attempting to murder a rival mob boss. He doesn’t want to leave the slammer, feeling safer inside. Once out, he resolves to finish the job before the man he maimed can find and kill him. At the same time, he considers leaving “the life,”

Three Sisters with Maiden Hearts (乙女ごころ三人姉妹) is a 1935 drama directed by Mikio Naruse and produced by Toho Company Ltd., and this company’s first-ever film and Naruse’s first sound film. Most of his earlier silent films remain lost. A major theme is financial struggle. The three sisters live with their strict, abusive mother and a trio of other young girls, all of whom rely on meager earnings from shamisen playing and dance performances for men in a theater and in shady bars

I really enjoyed The Naked Director (全裸監督) and kind of binged its eight episodes on Netflix over a couple days. Released in August (2019), the series (co-directed by Masaharu Take) felt fresh in the way it melded genres (comedy, porn, drama, melodrama, gangster, biography) and pokes fun at facets of Japanese society (mosaic blurring of the genitals in porn, reverence for the emperor, AV otaku culture). The genres clash at times, too, which caught me off guard more than once,

Twice in one week I’ve come to the end of a film and felt as though I were being abandoned in a quagmire of anxiety and hopelessness! The other was Dogtooth , and this one is Shoplifters (万引き家族), a Japanese drama written and directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, starring Lily Franky, Sakura Ando, Mayu Matsuoka, Kairi Jō, Miyu Sasaki, and Kirin Kiki. Though not blood relatives, the characters (pictured) rely on shoplifting, pachinko, sex shows and small cons to cope with poverty, an

I remember reading that Yukio Mishima’s film Patriotism ( Yūkoku ) (1966) had been found in his former home in 2005. His wife, who died ten years before the discovery, had requested that all copies of the film be destroyed after his suicide in 1970, and so none were thought to exist for a number of years until the negative was found in a wooden box. Patriotism is a film directed by Mishima and based on his short story of the same name, published in Death in Midsummer and Ot

Tampopo (1985), directed by Juzo Itami, is entertaining, funny, and occasionally bizarre. Truck drivers Gorō (a cool Tsutomu Yamazaki) and Gun (a young Ken Watanabe) happen upon a rundown ramen shop, where they stop for noodles and meet Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto), who hasn’t yet mastered the art of making ramen. She’s nowhere close, actually, and so tough-guy Gorō, in his cowboy hat, chivalrously sets out to show her the ropes. Along the way he falls in love with her, in a re

Kwaidan (1965) (meaning “ghost stories”) is a 182-minute horror film directed by Masaki Kobayashi. Based on works by Lafcadio Hearn, mostly from his collection Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things , the film is composed of four independent tales: “The Black Hair,” “The Woman of the Snow,” “Hoichi the Earless,” and “In a Cup of Tea.” I’ve been fascinated by Japanese ghost stories since first coming to Japan in the mid-90s. Around that time, I visited the grave of Oi

Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda (also known for Maborosi (1995) and Our Little Sister (2015)) breaks our hearts with Nobody Knows (2004), a film about the abandonment of four children who do what little they can to survive in a tiny Tokyo apartment, in Ota-ku it seems, as their dreams are slowly suffocated by neglect and desperate circumstances. It begins with a young mother and her eldest son, Akira, arriving at the building they’re about to move into, and they seem h

Grass Labyrinth ( Kusa Meikyū ) is a Japanese film by director Shuji Terayama. Only forty minutes long, it was released in France in 1979 along with two other short avant-garde films by Just Jaeckin and Walerian Borowczyk. A young man named Akira (Takeshi Wakamatsu) is searching for the music and lyrics to a song he loved as a boy. In his search, he slips into a kind of time warp, and his childhood and adulthood begin to blur together. There are strange recurring images—ball

Meito Bijomaru ( The Famous Sword Bijomaru ) is a 1945 film by director and screenwriter Kenji Mizoguchi. Kiyone Sakurai forges a sword for his benefactor, Kozaemon Onoda, but it shatters while Onoda is defending his lord. He's placed under house arrest for failing to protect the lord’s palanquin. Naito then tells Onoda that he can help restore his honor, if he's allowed to marry Onoda’s daughter, Sasae. When Onoda refuses, Naito kills him. Sasae instructs Kiyone to forge an

Rashomon . Among the most influential of all films, this 1950 Akira Kurosawa classic is better after the first viewing. I first watched it in the 90s and although certain scenes stayed with me over the years, something felt missing. Its contradictory accounts of rape and murder, told by four characters, seemed unresolved. Movies and TV shows I’d grown up with used what’s called the “Rashomon effect,” but they always revealed the truth in the end—a detective interviews multipl