Based on the classic novel by Murasaki Shikibu, written over 1000 years ago. Genji, the son of the emperor, has gained renown among the nobility of Kyoto for his charm and good looks, yet he cannot stop himself from pursuing the one object of desire he must never obtain: his father’s young and beautiful bride. Following the tragic consequences of his obsession, Genji wanders from one affair to another, always seeking some sort of resolution to his life.
Tag: JAPAN
In this surreal comic confection, a traditional naniwa-bushi singer moves to Prohibition-era San Francisco. He goes in search of Al Capone, whom he mistakenly believes is president, hoping to impress the gangster with his singing and to popularize the art form in the States.
A high school science teacher builds an atomic bomb and uses it to extort the nation, but cannot decide what he wants. Meanwhile, a determined cop is catching up to him, as is radiation poisoning.
Kagatani Shizuo, an employee at home electronics manufacturer Victor Company of Japan (JVC) is transferred to the home video division of the company’s Yokohama factory, and told to cut the division’s staff by 20%. But Kagatani doesn’t want to fire anyone so he decides to increase sales instead by developing a home video player. Inspired by Kagatani’s impassioned phrase, “We have to defend our jobs ourselves,” the employees pour their efforts into product development, and perfect a trial model, VHS.
Set in a dreamlike rural Japan, the story starts out to be about an adolescent boy’s attempt to escape his overprotective mother and then surprisingly becomes a filmmaker’s desire to confront his own elaborated creation. There is also an effort to reconcile the individual with the collective or old and new Japan through this parade of emblematic images. Gossiping women wear sinister eye patches. An outcast simple-minded woman drowns her own baby and later returns as a sophisticated prostitute. A circus fat lady yearns to have her fake body inflated by a dwarf. Curious and astounding scenes abound, all contributing to an overwhelming experience of a creative mind interrogating itself.
Three Japanese pilgrims arrive in India. Miss Naruse is looking for Otsu, a Catholic priest, her lover ten years before; after time in France and Israel, he has come to Benares where he carries the bodies of the poor to the crematorium. Her life is empty and, although Otsu was her lover only as a joke, she is now drawn to his spiritual nature. Mr. Isobe searches for a village child who may be the reincarnation of his dead wife. Mr. Yagusi comes to pray for the man who saved his life in World War II, a man haunted for 50 years by the means he used to save his comrade. Pantheism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity meet on the shores of the Ganges in these characters.
Tetsuro, a handsome but over-age college student, meets Shino, a beautiful but virtuous saki-shop waitress and falls in love with her. The Long Darkness is a long, solemn, ponderous modern love story set in Tokyo and in parts of northern Japan.