Ai Saotome

Fireflies in the North

Set in the icy wilderness of Hokkaido during the early days of the Meiji era, where the brutal warden of Kabato Prison terrorizes convicts sentenced to forced labor to build the roads needed to open up the territory.

She Cat

Dr. Cat Kagami was hoping to leave her torrid past behind, but a failed assassination attempt has now put her square in the crosshairs of a team of brutal killers. Now no one is safe, including her lesbian co-worker and a mysterious woman with a terrible secret that could bring down an entire Japanese company. Cat must take the law into her own hands and enact her own special kind of revenge!

Face

Awkward and withdrawn, Masako kills her sister in an explosion of pent-up humiliation and rage that sends her tumbling into fugitive life.

青春の構図

Based on the novel of the same name by Ayako Sono

The Seburi Story

The culturally isolated, nomadic Seburi people of western Japan are the subject of this tragedy about a few of the community's members who especially experience difficulties as modern Japan encroaches on their world. The setting is World War II, and conflicts have already arisen when the military police come to take Seburi men away into the army. Still following their own customs that can be harsh at times, and are particularly cruel to women (women must give birth alone and unaided, a woman's adultery is punished by burying her up to her neck in the earth and then leaving her for days), the Seburi are mainly treated with fear and animosity by the non-Seburi townspeople of the region. Along with the hardships arising from cultural clashes, nature's own vagaries present other challenges to the Seburi -- who still lived in tents until the 1950s. Winter avalanches and snowstorms cause as much havoc as the tensions engendered by the slow encroachment of the modern world.

Tora-san Meets the Songstress Again

Tora-san visits Hokkaido and is reunited with Lily. Now divorced, she plans to resume her singing career and renews her unusual relationship with Tora-san.

Shabu

Makabe is a yakuza who is addicted to 'shabu' (a slang refers to stimulant drug). He lives as if he wants to destroy himself. He steals a mistress of the boss of a big yakuza syndicate by force. He takes over the yakuza group he belongs to, by killing the old boss. When he tries to use 'shabu' as the main financial resource of his group, it leads to the serious confrontation with another big yakuza syndicate.

Don't Cry, Nanking

In December 1937, during the Second Japanese-Sino War, a Chinese doctor, his Japanese pregnant wife, their teenage daughter and their young son travel from Shanghai to Nanjing seeking shelter in the Capital during the Japanese invasion. The family faces the Rape of Nanking by the Imperial Japanese Army, with rapes, mass murder of prisoners of war and civilians including women, children and elders, and disrespect of international conventions.