Keiko Utsumi

GOZEN is a jidageki (period piece) dramas. The word “gozen” refers to a feudal game held in the presence of a Daimyo, described as a match “one must not lose”.

Screen icon Sayuri Yoshinaga stars in this historical melodrama about geishas in the southern city of Nagasaki set during the 1920s. Though she was sold to a geisha house at a young age, Aihara (Yoshinaga) has since become a master samisen player and woman of great elegance. Though not especially rich, she doles out money to street kids, in particular, a pretty young flower vendor named Oyuki, who becomes Aihara's godchild of sorts. Yet when a geisha (Reiko Takashima) from a rival red-light district insults Aihara and her brethren, she fights back. Soon an all-out geisha war looms. Dapper businessman and amateur scholar Tojiro Koga (Tetsuya Watari) appears on the scene and defuses tempers -- suggesting that difference be settled through a competition of artistic abilities. Smitten with her talent and mature beauty, Koga invites Aihara to record Nagasaki folk songs before they disappear forever

After an accident leaves Shinobu blind, the daughter of an old Asakusa soba shop works to rebuild her independence with the help of rehabilitation training and a guide-dog instructor.

Kunio Shibano was bankrupted. He visits a snowland spa area to commit suicide. But he meets Geisha Moeko, and she gives him power to face life one more time...

Yui, a college student, moves in to her first own apartment, where she begins her new independent life in a big city. Soon after, the upstairs neighbor Takashi sparks her interest.

In one of the districts of Tokyo, an old school is planned to be torn down after the summer holidays. The only person who is seriously worried about this is the Japanese language teacher Nakajima. He decides to hold special additional classes for the lagging students during the summer holidays, which they will keep as a memento of the old school.

A drama depicting the world of the female writer Midori Osaki in three parts: the dramatic creation of her masterpiece, "Wanderings in the Realm of the Seventh Sense," her unknown years spent in poor health and poverty, and the present-day world from which we see her work.

1997 V-Cinema film.