Ai Saotome

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.

Former childhood friends Kadoya Kaneo and Tochino Masatatsu cross paths again. Kaneo is now a yakuza member, while Masatatsu is a nightclub owner with a distaste for crime gangs. When a yakuza boss dies, a struggle for his position takes place between Kaneo's boss Awano and the young Nakahira. Nakahira's men try to extort money from Masatatsu, bringing him in between a yakuza battle.

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!

Awkward and withdrawn, Masako kills her sister in an explosion of pent-up humiliation and rage that sends her tumbling into fugitive life.

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

Who will be the next prime minister? As two candidates start to compete, political game and brutal murder ensue. And the existence of secret love letters changes the situation.

Narumi, a man out for revenge with the powers he received and a bit of help from the one who saved his life, he creates the persona of Skull Soldier and attempts to discover who really killed his sister.