Movies: Ayako Wakao

The lives of five prostitutes employed at a Japanese brothel while the nation is debating the passage of an anti-prostitution law....

When a theater troupe's master visits his old flame, he unintentionally sets off a chain of unexpected events with devastating consequences. A remake of Ozu's own silent film The Story of Floating Weeds (1934)....

Eiko seeks out Miyoharu, a geisha, and asks to be her apprentice. When she is ready to receive clients, both women want the right to refuse certain men....

In Edo Japan, a kabuki actor seeks revenge against the three men who drove his parents to their deaths years ago....

The four principals in a love affair collide when jealousy, blackmail and suicide enter the picture....

Otsuya, the daughter of a rich merchant, elopes with her lover Shinsuke, an employee of her father's. During their flight, Otsuya's beauty attracts the gaze of Seikichi, a mysterious master tattooist who sees her pristine white skin as the perfect ca...

With a price on his head, Ichi seeks tranquillity in a favorite village. Since his last visit, it has fallen prey to Boss Masagoro, the son of a merchant rumored to have stolen gold from the shogunate. The boss has hired Yojimbo as his hard-drinking ...

Tied to a mountain between her brutalizing spouse and her secret lover, disaster strikes; the authorities accuse her of murder and prompt a confession....

Two poor, married farmers have recently lost their only child; after a freak visitation, they pry open an alien cocoon to greet their new daughter....

Seventeen years after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a newspaper reporter looks for the bomb's effects, but everyone seems to have forgotten. He meets a woman who was there when it happened but when they fall in love she isn't able to move...

On his release from prison a young yakuza, along with his brother, decides to turn his back on criminal life instead of taking over the position of his recently deceased father, boss of the Asahina clan. But their exit proves more difficult than plan...

In 1939, Sakura Nishi is a young army nurse who is sent to the field hospitals in China during the Sino-Japanese war. She has to assist the surgeon Dr. Okabe with an incredible number of amputations. In the crowded wards, she gives sympathy to some o...

A greedy, materialistic family attempts to cover-up the embezzlement committed by the son while keeping their other schemes active. They discover there are other, equally conniving players involved....

Yuko is sent to the coastal regions to be raised away from the rest of her sophisticated family where she finds out from her ill grandmother that she is not who she thought she was....

In 39 interviews with actors and actresses, writers, producers and staff members, interspersed with film excerpts and stills, Shindō recounts the life and career of his friend and mentor Mizoguchi....

The disturbing story of a physician who conducted the first operation with general anaesthetic, and the women in his life who are both so determined to win his love that they volunteer as subjects for his experiments...

Kikuji is the scion of an Osaka merchant family whose traditional power is matrilineal. Instructed by his overbearing mother and grandmother to give them an heiress for the family business, he stands by helplessly as his wife is thrown out of the hou...

Japan, 1701. A group of samurai become rônin after their lord is forced to commit seppuku for assaulting a court official, who will become the target of a merciless revenge....

Based on the first novel, Spring Snow, of Mishima Yukio's Sea of Fertility tetralogy, it follows the troubled and illicit affair between two youngsters amongst the aristocracy and rich of early twentieth century Japan....

Satoko is a mistress by trade or fate: when her master, the silkscreen artist of the Kohoan Temple in Kyoto, dies, she is given to the temple's lascivious head priest Kikuchi. She is drawn to a melancholy young acolyte, Jinen, who has observed the pr...