Hideko Okiyama

This film follows the daily lives of a group of people barely scraping by in a slum on the outskirts of Tokyo. Yet as desperate as their circumstances are, each of them—the homeless father and son envisioning their dream house; the young woman abused by her uncle; the boy who imagines himself a trolley conductor—finds reasons to carry on.

Tokyo engineer Kariya arrives on a primitive tropical island, where he interacts with the Futori clan, to drill a well to power a sugar mill.

A man is trying to flee from his past, and he ends up in an underworld filled with strange characters. He finds a job skewering meat in a dirty old room in a shabby old house filled with prostitutes, gangsters and a weird old tattoo master. He clearly doesn't fit in to this new world, and the inhabitants of it immediately despise him.

A 19-year-old newspaper delivery boy begins collecting information on the households in his neighborhood and keeping a journal of why he doesn't like them. Declaring himself a 'right-winger' and calling in bomb threats against the neighbors he doesn't like, the 19-year-old begins a war of psychological terror against the families in his neighborhood.

Taro Kuroki, 42, is a stuntman with a samurai's heart. He loves adventures, plays pranks with the police, tries to cure a cat lady by reversing her trauma, and finally, rescues his niece who is about to be lured into prostitution.

An uptight young man comes to suspect that his factory worker girlfriend has a secret involving his boorish older brother.

A 1920s playwright meets a beautiful woman who may be the ghost of his patron's deceased wife.

In the sixth and final episode Rentaro Mikuni steals the show as Baiken Shishido, Musashi's nemesis. Mikuni is the nominal villain of the film, but he is a devoted husband and father as well. He tries to kill Musashi only to avenge the death of his brother-in-law. While Baiken (who wields a chain and sickle against Musashi's sword) is a very human character and the emotions that Mikuni displays in his performance are quite believable and engaging