Kunio Otsuka

The world-famous woodblock artist Hokusai (1760-1849), a widower in need of a steady income, lives with his daughter Oei in the house of his friend Bakin.

After their lord is tricked into committing ritual suicide, forty-seven samurai warriors await the chance to avenge their master and reclaim their honor.

A war widow with a young boy manages a farm with her bossy mother-in-law. When a reporter comes to interview her, the two begin an affair. He turns out to be married and won't leave his wife. Her older brother tries to marry off his children and hang on to/ extend his farm through an advantageous marriage in the face of threatened land confiscation and the desire of his children to get comfortable urban jobs instead of the backbreaking work in the paddy fields under parental control.

The story is about the social problems faced by Japan's indigenous Ainu, mostly centered on the reactions of the characters to their oppressed state.

In 1943, the Aleutian island of Kiska was fortified by a small contingent of Japanese soldiers. When word arrived of an impending attack by an overwhelming force of Americans, the Japanese Navy attempted one of the most daring and unlikely evacuations in military history. This is that story.

Mejika, reputed for her iron discipline, is hired as a biology teacher at a renowned high school. But her provocative attitude starts to worry the school's administration as she reveals vice and corruption that are running rampant in the school.

A woman and her daughter are in love with the same man, a chef at the restaurant that the mother manages. He is slightly crippled from frostbite in his years in Siberian labor camps and considers himself 'already dead'.