Aya Hashimoto

Based on crime fiction novel written by Seicho Matsumoto.

Detective Ushio is called in to the murder of an elite heart surgeon, who was stabbed twice at a cluster of vending machines in a parking lot.

Masanao Ushio and other detectives from Shinjuku West PD discover the strangled dead body of a woman in an empty building in West Shinjuku in Tokyo. According to her husband Takeshi, the murdered Chieko Akiba was a top salesperson at the insurance company where she worked, but quit her job three months ago and planned to open a beauty salon after buying the building which happens to be the crime scene. The call history on her mobile phone reveals the victim answered a call at 8:16 PM and is presumed to have been murdered immediately afterwards. However, Ushio is surprised to hear who was on the other side of the call: Kyoko Yamano, a woman who accompanied Ushio under an umbrella on a rainy night one year ago and whose husband was killed by someone that very night...

Richness, severity and pureness of love is beautifully and sentimentally depicted.

In 1908, a ruined businessman is forced to sell his daughter, Hisano, to a brothel in Yoshiwara, the largest red-light district in Tokyo. The owners of the brothel have hopes to make her a great new addition which will attract the richest of customers. But after several months of training, she tries to flee Yoshiwara when the time has come for her to take her first customer.

A confessional article in a weekly magazine and the strange suspense between an ordinary housewife who sees it. A mother tries to kill her son's lover, whom she doesn't take too kindly to, and paint them into the wall of her apartment...