Taking its title from an archaic Japanese word meaning "ghost story," this anthology adapts four folk tales. A penniless samurai marries for money with tragic results. A man stranded in a blizzard is saved by Yuki the Snow Maiden, but his rescue comes at a cost. Blind musician Hoichi is forced to perform for an audience of ghosts. An author relates the story of a samurai who sees another warrior's reflection in his teacup.
When car dealer Charlie Babbitt learns that his estranged father has died, he returns home to Cincinnati, where he discovers that he has a savant older brother named Raymond and that his father's $3 million fortune is being left to the mental institution in which Raymond lives. Motivated by his father's money, Charlie checks Raymond out of the facility in order to return with him to Los Angeles. The brothers' cross-country trip ends up changing both their lives.
A circus' beautiful trapeze artist agrees to marry the leader of side-show performers, but his deformed friends discover she is only marrying him for his inheritance.
Blind traveler Zatoichi is a master swordsman and a masseur with a fondness for gambling on dice games. When he arrives in a village torn apart by warring gangs, he sets out to protect the townspeople.
Charlie Simms is a student at a private preparatory school who comes from a poor family. To earn the money for his flight home to Gresham, Oregon for Christmas, Charlie takes a job over Thanksgiving looking after retired U.S. Army officer Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade, a cantankerous middle-aged man who lives with his niece and her family.
Hazuki and Aoi are classmates but their relationship outside class is fraught, and outside school non-existent. But when both girls are drawn to helping an elderly woman, they're forced to interact, confronting their differences and similarities as well as their deepest secrets.
While fighting for a woman who sits on death row, a lawyer happens upon new information which brings into question the motives of a man associated with her client
Blind Mrs. Lind comes to American to visit her three children whom she thinks are successful.
9 bullet wounds (one still in the body), three different sports and an unshakable determination to fulfill the dream of an Olympic Gold later, Muralikant Petkar, India's first Paralympian to finish at the top of the podium, got the recognition by his own country 45 years after he achieved what no athlete from his country could.
After returning home from the war, Vietnam veteran Julius Vrooder resides in a veteran's hospital, where he has been vaguely diagnosed as "psychiatrically impaired." Taking the news with an air of initially lighthearted defiance, Vrooder escapes and sets up camp under a highway, where he builds a paranoia-driven booby-trapped bunker for himself. Falling in love with not-so-bright nurse Zanni, Vrooder soon plans to elope with her to a remote Canadian outpost.
A down-on-his-luck crab fisherman embarks on a journey to get a young man with Down syndrome to a professional wrestling school in rural North Carolina and away from the retirement home where he’s lived for the past two and a half years.
In 19th-century Italy, Giacomo Leopardi channels his debilitating illness and isolation into poetry.
Charlie is a sensitive teenager who doesn't fit in. She cares for her disabled mom but gets bullied at school. When she turns down her place at university, her mom takes radical steps to ensure her daughter is free to complete her education.
Judge Priest, a proud Confederate veteran, restores the justice in a small town in the Post-Bellum Kentucky using his common sense and his great sense of humanity.
Miles from civilization, a blind teenager and the hunter he befriends are tormented by a mysterious creature lurking in the woods.
Rizwan Khan, a Muslim from the Borivali section of Mumbai, has Asperger's syndrome. He marries a Hindu single mother, Mandira, in San Francisco. After 9/11, Rizwan is detained by authorities at LAX who treat him as a terrorist because of his condition and his race.
Patrick (bitter wheelchair user) must enlist the help of his cantankerous neighbor Robert (double amputee veteran) to transport the four-year-old daughter he never knew he had to live with her maternal grandparents on the other side of the country.
A deaf man and his girlfriend resort to desperate measures in order to fund a kidney transplant for his sister. Things go horribly wrong, and the situation spirals rapidly into a cycle of violence and revenge.
A father and daughter live a perfect but mysterious existence in Forest Park, a beautiful nature reserve near Portland, Oregon, rarely making contact with the world. But when a small mistake tips them off to authorities, they are sent on an increasingly erratic journey in search of a place to call their own.
Billie Dupree is a flight instructor at an old Texas airport. When a young girl in a wheelchair finds the airport by watching gliders fly, she decides she wants to learn how to fly. Dupree teaches her to fly with some special controls compensating for her handicap. Koup Trenton runs an aircraft repair service and is trying desperately to get an old airplane back in the air. The three, together, put the young girl and the old plane up in the air.