Shinya Kashima

Suicide has long been used as a form of social protest in Japan. In this film, set in 1703, samurai culture is being transformed by the emergence of a new merchant class. Elements of the social contract are beginning to unravel, and some unscrupulous people took undue advantage of these changes before the social order was re-created. In this story, a rich merchant gives his clerk an I.O.U. instead of wages. When the impoverished clerk presents the paper to the merchant at the agreed upon time asking for payment, the man flies into a rage and pretends he never wrote it and claims the clerk is trying to defraud him. Then he sets his henchmen on the clerk to administer a beating.

A father curries favor with his bosses to further his career, but his wife has lost faith in him. She returns to her family home while they rent out their house during the summer to pay off their mortgage, and there she meets a lonely old man...

When a family comprised of a couple with one son is hurled into poverty when the businessman father loses his business, the mother and son move to stay with their former maid. With the father departing to the mountain still in search of gold, his wife begins the hard work required at a paper mill so they can make ends meet and the son can attend school. However, when one day a friend notices the son's talent at drawing she helps him obtain a part-time job thus helping him afford his school textbooks. Then the father returns.

A trading company employee's girlfriend loses her memory while on a trip. In place of the friend who was supposed to have accompanied her the whole time is a mysterious man.

A fatal skin disease forces a beautiful actress to retire from the screen. She puts a sinister plan into motion to transplant her brain into her own daughter Sakura. She hears her mother's unbelievable confession of her past, tries to escape in vain. After the horrible operation, she starts a new life as a normal little girl. And she seduces the piano teacher, tries to inherit her mother's properties.... Then a police detective who is suspicious of her mother's sudden disappearance starts sniffing around her...