Kinuyo Tanaka

A tale of ambition, family, love, and war set in the midst of the Japanese Civil Wars of the sixteenth century.

In medieval Japan, a compassionate governor is sent into exile. His wife and children try to join him, but are separated, and the children grow up amid suffering and oppression.

Follows a woman's fight and survival amid the vicissitudes of life and the cruelty of society.

A businessman clashes with his elder daughter over her choice of a husband.

A kabuki theatre-inflected story about a poor village whose people have to be carried to a nearby mountain to die once they get old.

Shinnosuke is introduced to Shizu as a prospective wife, 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 Shinnos...

A man returns from World War II to find his desperate wife had resorted to one night of prostitution to pay for their son's hospital bills.

Setsuko is unhappily married to Mimura, an engineer with no job and a drinking habit. She's always been in love with Hiroshi, but he left for France years ago without proposing. Now he is back and Mariko (Setsuko's sister) tries t...

A gangster tries to find redemption with the inadvertent help of an innocent shop girl and his jealous girlfriend will do anything to keep him.

A journalist interviews an old woman who was forced into prostitution, just like many other Japanese women working in Asia outside of Japan during the first half of the 20th century. She worked in a Malaysian brothel called Sandak...

Fumiko, mother of two children and wife of an unfaithful man who shows a low self esteem, shares her family life with her asleep vocation as a poetess. The beginning of her successful literary career coincides with her divorce and...

Explores the wounds of war, the limits of love and the need to forgive. A sad and troubled man, Reikichi Mayumi finds a new job five years after the end of WWII, where he writes love letters for other people.

Kenichi Horie is determined to challenge his family, the law and the nature crossing the Pacific to America in a small sailboat. Despite his careful planning many unforeseen events will test his determination.

Mokichi is the widowed father of three daughters, with whom he lives on the premises of a temple since the war. All three daughters become involved in some sort of complicated relationships.

A few days in the life of a quiet geisha, single mother of a young, smart boy, in the lively Tokyo quarter of Ginza. A woman devoted to other people's needs, she will end by taking part herself in one of the many disguises of Ginza.

A prostitute tries to change her life after the enforcement of an anti-prostitution law.

A tea master and his daughter Ogin are both Christians in feudal Japan. Ogin falls in love with a married feudal prince who shares her faith. When the Shogun bans Christianity, the situation worsens.

The story of an orphan girl, brought up in naive, rustic innocence by an elderly relative, who is suddenly exposed to the brutality, greed and deceptiveness of the outside world, when her grandmother dies.

In this second part to The Yotsuda Phantom, Iemon's apparent success is minimized by his own feelings of guilt, the quickly mounting evidence, and Naosuke's constant hounding.

A jewelry store president begins to fall for the doctor treating her husband's illness.

A film adaptation of the autobiography of Aishinkakura Hiro, who lived a tumultuous life as the consort of Fuketsu, the younger brother of Emperor Puyi of Manchukuo.

In a military family, an illegitimate son is brutalized by his brothers. A patriarchal, feudalistic household where dissent is forbidden is used to reveal the whole imperialist system that afflicted Japan between 1921 and 1946.