A young boy takes interest in piano while his family begins to disintegrate around him after his father loses his job.
Three distinct tales unfold in the bustling city of Tokyo. Merde, a bizarre sewer-dweller, emerges from a manhole and begins terrorizing pedestrians. After his arrest, he stands trial and lashes out at a hostile courtroom. A man who has resigned himself to a life of solitude reconsiders after meeting a charming pizza delivery woman. And finally, a happy young couple find themselves undergoing a series of frightening metamorphoses.
In order to avoid a jail sentence, Sean Boswell heads to Tokyo to live with his military father. In a low-rent section of the city, Shaun gets caught up in the underground world of drift racing
In a small Tokyo apartment, twelve-year-old Akira must care for his younger siblings after their mother leaves them and shows no sign of returning.
Two lost souls visiting Tokyo -- the young, neglected wife of a photographer and a washed-up movie star shooting a TV commercial -- find an odd solace and pensive freedom to be real in each other's company, away from their lives in America.
Tragedy strikes a married couple vacationing in the Moroccan desert, which jumpstarts an interlocking story involving four different families.
A story of three escort girls living in Ikebukuro, Tokyo. They work at the same escort service while feeling lonely in their urban lives.
Mika works as a nurse by day; by night she entertains covetous men at a girls' bar. Shinji is blind in one eye and ekes out a living as a construction worker. Young and grown-up at the same time, they both lead a lonely existence, but somehow their paths keep miraculously crossing under the Tokyo sky.
A daughter is constantly overshadowed by her famous father, but she is determined to make her own mark in the world.
Max is a former playboy who has decided to settle down by marrying his current love, Muriel. However, when Max catches a glimpse of the great lost love of his life, he becomes obsessed with rekindling their relationship.
Kei works at a cocktail bar, while Ai works as a model. Fearing she'll be ostracized by society, Kei chooses not to admit her sexual orientation to anyone, and, as a result, she becomes distressed and lonely. One day, Kei gets close to Naima, an Iranian student studying art in Japan.
Betrayal spawns an unexpected night through the streets of Tokyo for two strangers left questioning the meaning of life and love.
A mysterious woman, known as Madame M, kidnaps forty pre-teen girls and transports them to a remote island to train them as the most deadly assassins. CIA operative Jack Chen follows the case for 6 years with no leads, but when a series of assassinations begin to occur, Jack suspects that Madame M is back in business.
On Christmas Eve, three homeless people living on the streets of Tokyo discover a newborn baby among the trash and set out to find its parents.
Teenage Mutsuko comes to Tokyo for work but ends up at a repair shop. She befriends the owner's family. Neighbors Hiromi, writer Chagawa with admirer Junnosuke strive alongside them in postwar Tokyo's evolution.
An American woman is stranded in Tokyo after breaking up with her boyfriend. Searching for direction in life, she trains to be a ramen chef under a tyrannical Japanese master.
The elderly Shukishi and his wife, Tomi, take the long journey from their small seaside village to visit their adult children in Tokyo. Their elder son, Koichi, a doctor, and their daughter, Shige, a hairdresser, don't have much time to spend with their aged parents, and so it falls to Noriko, the widow of their younger son who was killed in the war, to keep her in-laws company.
This psychedelic tour of life after death is seen entirely from the point of view of Oscar, a young American drug dealer and addict living in Tokyo with his prostitute sister, Linda. When Oscar is killed by police during a bust gone bad, his spirit journeys from the past -- where he sees his parents before their deaths -- to the present -- where he witnesses his own autopsy -- and then to the future, where he looks out for his sister from beyond the grave.
Mr. Takazawa, an elderly invalid who is cared for at his home by Haruko, a young nursing student, is chosen by the Japanese Ministry of Public Welfare to test the Z-001, a computerized hospital bed with robotic features that allegedly displays more efficiency and skills than any human nurse, but Haruko mistrusts a machine unable to consider human feelings.
With delicate, unobtrusive strokes, Naruse evokes both the humor and bitterness of his characters’ dilemmas, in this bleak, compelling poignant portrait of a quartet of aging geishas contemplating their troubles with men and money.