This biopic is centered on New Year’s Day of 1894, when Kitamura is recovering from a suicide attempt. Japan is then under the spell of fervent patriotism because the government wants to build up public support for a war with China. Kitamura’s literary friends and militant comrades come to visit. They wonder why Kitamura wants to kill himself. Kitamura at first refuses to receive them, then he sits down with them and looks back on his days as a civil rights militant, his stormy love life and his ardent but destructive desire to live literature to the full.
Tag: JAPAN
A war widow searches for the true reason behind her husband’s death, and why she’s been unable to collect survivor benefits. It turns out he has been classified a traitor and a deserter, and the exact cause of his death listed as ‘unknown’. She sets out on a quest to find the people he served with, to determine the real story behind the government smokescreen.
A married couple looking for an apartment move in with the husband’s co-worker, a widower. The husband becomes jealous of the widower and his wife.
Kuroki, a journalist for a trade paper, is investigating clandestine arms sales to Southeast Asia. He discovers that the point man in the illegal arms trading was also involved in the cover-up of a murder on an American base during the Allied Occupation. The film rolls along as a suspenseful thriller while offering a critique of political corruption, hypocrisy, and journalistic cowardice in postwar Japan.
A commission from the Ministry of Education for an educational film about rural youth, Mizoguchi’s earliest extant feature observes the tensions that erupt among a group of village children when two privileged youth return from Tokyo where they have been studying in a private school.
A socially committed film about the feudal state of many Japanese women in 1946. Hiroko Hosokawa, a female lawyer, defends Mrs. Asakura, who suffocated her child in her grief after her husband died penniless following an industrial accident. The prosecutor is Hiroko’s sister’s husband Kono, who also sent Hiroko’s fiance, Yamaoka, to jail for his liberal views during the war. Yamaoka has just been freed, but is seriously ill from his time in prison.
A delightful and moving coming-of-age story. One summer, three young boys take an increasing interest in an eccentric old man who lives alone in a house surrounded by an overgrown garden. The boys form a bond with the recluse and set about weeding and replanting the garden.