An unexpected love triangle, a seduction trap, and a random encounter are the three episodes, told in three movements to depict three female characters and trace the trajectories between their choices and regrets.
Anzukko (Little Peach) is the daughter of a successful writer. She turns down each one of her suitors, until she marries a beginning writer named Ryokichi. Their life quickly sinks into despair.
Seven-year-old Rio visits her grandparents in Japan for the first time. She observes the beauty and unfamiliarity of the household, sensing a distance between her American family and the Japanese relatives. When her mother, Seiko, reveals an open secret during tea, the children are excused from the room and something happens behind closed doors.
A shy country girl chooses a part-time job at a maid cafe where she serves customers while dressed up as a maid.
Shinji and Masaru spend most of their school days harassing fellow classmates and playing pranks. They drop out and Shinji becomes a small-time boxer, while Masaru joins up with a local yakuza gang. However, the world is a tough place.
Eight years after the devastating tsunami, the wounds it left in Japan have still not healed. In her touching search for answers, Haru sets out on a long, eventful journey to her home town, where she lost her family in the flood.
Only three days before the school festival, a newly formed high school band rushes to put together a set for their big show — including a hit single by '80s by the Japanese punk rock band The Blue Hearts.
Buddies working at an oshibori factory bond over an uncontrollable rage neither can control, as well as a strange jellyfish they keep as a pet.
Yumi Fukuzawa is an ordinary first year student at Lillian Girls' Academy. By chance Yumi meets second year student Sachiko Ogasawara, who is a candidate to become a Red Rose. Sachiko later offers her rosary to Yumi Fukuzawa which signifies she will become an older sister to Yumi. Meanwhile, Yumi, who already looks up to popular Sachiko, is perplexed why she is picked. A festival named "Cinderella" then approaches, which is run by the Yamayuri Council. Conflicts between the older and younger sisters soon begins ...
Every day, Jay travels the length and breadth of Tokyo in his taxi, looking for his daughter Lily. In the 9 years since he has separated from his wife, he has never been able to get custody of his daughter. Having given up hope of ever seeing her again, he is about to move back to France when Lily hops in his cab. But she doesn't recognize him.
In the city of Yokosuka, Kinta and his lover Haruko, both involved with yakuza, brave the post-occupation period with a goal to be together.
Late 18th century, Tohoku. An outcast girl, Rin lives in a village suffering from famine. She draws strength from Mt. Hayachine, where the spirits of humans ascend after passing.
Rick, a down-and-out American boxer, is hired to transport a sword to Japan, unaware that the whole thing is a set up in a bitter blood-feud between two brothers, one who follows the traditional path of the samurai and the other a businessman. At the behest of the businessman, Rick undertakes samurai training from the other brother, but joins his cause. He also becomes romantically involved with the samurai's daughter.
Two high school girls who are about to graduate also happen to be highly-skilled assassins. When the organization they work for orders them to share a room, their relationship quickly sours. But when they become targets of the yakuza, the girls realize they'll have to work together to survive.
Volunteering as a "comfort woman" on the Manchurian front, where she is expected to service hundreds of soldiers, Harumi is commandeered by the brutal Lieutenant Narita but falls for the sensitive Mikami, Narita's direct subordinate. Seijun Suzuki's Story of a Prostitute is a tragic love story as well as a rule-bending take on a popular Taijiro Tamura novel, challenging military and fraternal codes of honor, as seen through Harumi's eyes.
After being used and betrayed by the detective she had fallen in love with, young Matsu is sent to a female prison full of sadistic guards and disobedient prisoners.
In a once-scenic village now dominated by a vast trash disposal site, a young man yearns to break free from a cruel fate tying him to the very grounds.
Nathan Algren is an American hired to instruct the Japanese army in the ways of modern warfare, which finds him learning to respect the samurai and the honorable principles that rule them. Pressed to destroy the samurai's way of life in the name of modernization and open trade, Algren decides to become an ultimate warrior himself and to fight for their right to exist.
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.
A Swiss nun falls in love with a Japanese engineer.