I watched Hirokazu Kore-eda's Shoplifters (2018) earlier this year and really enjoyed it. Our Little Sister (2015), also written and...

Action in the North Atlantic (1943; also called Heroes Without Uniforms) is a black-and-white war film starring Humphrey Bogart and...

Osaka Elegy (Japanese: 浪華悲歌, Naniwa Elegy) is a 1936 film written and directed by Kenji Mizoguchi and featuring many of the same actors...

Kenji Mizoguchi's 1936 film, Sisters of the Gion (Japanese: 祇園の姉妹), tells the story of two sisters working as geisha in the pleasure...

A View from the Chuo Line and Other Stories (2005) is a collection of twenty-seven stories by Donald Richie. Richie was an authority on...

Star (1960), recently translated into English for a release in April of this year, is a novella by Yukio Mishima written in the first...

Afraid to Die (Japanese: (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...

Late Chrysanthemums (Japanese: 晩菊, Bangiku) is a 1954 film directed by Mikio Naruse. During tough times after the war, four retired...

I finally got around to watching 2046 (2004), the third film in Wong Kar-wai's loosely connected trilogy, following Days of Being Wild...

For this 100th blog post, I revisited Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954) after not seeing it for a quarter century. I've watched...

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., the company's...

After the Quake (published in Japan in 2000 and in English in 2002) by Japanese author Haruki Murakami is a collection of six short...

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...

A Wild Sheep Chase (羊をめぐる冒険, in Japanese) is a 1982 novel by Haruki Murakami. It's sort of a mystery with magical realism mixed in (the...

Twice in one week I've come to the end of a film and felt like I was being abandoned in a quagmire of anxiety and hopelessness. The other...

I remember reading in 2005 that Yukio Mishima's film Patriotism (Yūkoku in Japanese) (1966) had been found in his former home. His wife,...

Death in Midsummer and Other Stories is a 1953 collection of stories by Yukio Mishima that was translated into English in the 1960s. I've...

Tampopo (1985), directed by Juzo Itami, is entertaining, funny and occasionally bizarre. Truck drivers Gorō (a cool Tsutomu Yamazaki) and...

Lafcadio Hearn lived a wandering life. Born in Greece in 1850 and raised in Ireland, he emigrated at a young age to the U.S. and became a...

Tokyo Story is a 1953 film directed by Yasujirō Ozu and starring Chishū Ryū, Chieko Higashiyama, and Setsuko Hara. Often listed among the...