Peace in 17th-century Japan causes the Shogunate's breakup of warrior clans, throwing thousands of samurai out of work and into poverty. An honorable end to such fate under the samurai code is ritual suicide, or hara-kiri.

Daigo Kobayashi is a devoted cellist in an orchestra that has just been dissolved and finds himself without a job. He decides to move back to his old hometown with his wife to look for work and start over. He answers a classified ad entitled 'Departures' thinking it is an advertisement for a travel agency. He discovers that the job is actually for a 'Nokanshi' or 'encoffineer,' a funeral professional who prepares deceased bodies for burial and entry...

Set in the Middle Ages, the nature of truth and subjective reality are probed in a series of flashbacks from four viewpoints to present the case history of a man's murder and the rape of his wife by a bandit.

A deaf elementary school girl named Shoko Nishimiya transfers to a new school and meets a boy named Shoya Ishida. Shoya leads the school in bullying Shoko over her disability until she transfers to another school. Immediately, the class bullies Shoya for having bullied Shoko. Shoya loses contact with Shoko, and for years he suffers the consequences of his guilt. Upon entering high school, Shoya finally decides he must find Shoko, determined to make...

Haruhi Suzumiya drafts Kyon and a few others of their classmates into the after school club that she starts, the Save our world by Overloading it with fun Suzumiya Haruhi's Brigade, or the S.O.S. Brigade for short. Her club searches for all things extraordinary, like aliens, time travelers and ESP.

A young executive hunts down his father's killer. A tale about corruption in the boardrooms of postwar corporate Japan as seen through the rising executive eyes.

It follows an ensemble of junior high students in a provincial town, beset by a summery malaise as a typhoon looms. When the storm makes landfall, the teens find themselves holed up in their school unsupervised, while another classmate disappears alone on a harrowing trek to the big city, set adrift in a world suddenly unmoored, the students let loose their pent-up angst and burgeoning passions in a series of propulsive, phantasmic scenes, part apocalypse,...

Yui Kiyohara's slow and graceful film follows a day in the life of three women of different ages as their paths crisscross in a Tokyo suburb. Exquisitely shot by Yukiko Iioka (Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy) with calming long takes and the occasional drifting camera that seems to have a perspective all its own. A charming, deceptively simple take on the hidden riches of everyday life.

Deep in the windswept marshes of war-torn medieval Japan, an impoverished older woman and her daughter-in-law murder lost samurai and sell their belongings for the most meager of sustenance. When a bedraggled neighbor returns from battle, lust, jealousy, and rage threaten to destroy the trio's tenuous existence before an ominous, ill-gotten demon mask seals their horrifying fate. Driven by primal emotions, dark eroticism, a frenzied score by Hikaru...

The story examines the motherly love of a peasant woman who gives up everything so that her son can receive education in Tokyo. Ten years later, the mother pays her son a visit in Tokyo, believing that he has become a successful young man. However, upon arrival, she is bitterly disappointed to find out that her son is working as a night-school teacher and living in poverty with his family. New interviews with film scholars Tadao Sato, David Bordwell,...