Movies: Nobuko Otowa

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....

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 ...

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 ...

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...

Based on the novel by Toyoko Yamazaki....

The year is 1932, and a woman, whose tenant-farmer fiancé is fighting in China, is raped by the landowner's son, who has returned from the war with a crippling injury, and then forced into marriage with him. In four more chapters, presented over thre...

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...

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....

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....

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 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....

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....

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

Story of a woman, Saiko, who divorces her doctor husband when she is given a baby by a stranger who claims it is the husband's child. Saiko embarks on an affair with her cousin's husband, but a crisis threatens when she discovers that her ex-husband ...

An Inn at Osaka, rarely seen outside Japan, follows the story of an insurance company executive from Tokyo, Mr. Mito, who is demoted to the Osaka office. He takes a room at a small inn and tries to rebuild his life. Notable for its exquisite framing ...

Former playmates (Naito and Tamura), both long ago abandoned by their parents, recall their youth and fall in love....

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....

The life and travels of adventurer Naomi Uemura, who disappeared in Alaska in 1984. A member of the first Japanese expedition to reach the summit of Mt Everest in 1970, Uemura also accomplished several "firsts". He was the first man to reach the Nort...

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....