Nobuko Otowa

While her son, Kichi, is away at war, a woman and her daughter-in-law survive by killing samurai who stray into their swamp, then selling whatever valuables they find. Both are devastated when they learn that Kichi has died, but his wife soon begins an affair with a neighbor who survived the war, Hachi. The mother disapproves and, when she can't steal Hachi for herself, tries to scare her daughter-in-law with a mysterious mask from a dead samurai.

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.

A family of four are the sole inhabitants of a small island, where they struggle each day to irrigate their crops.

In the Sengoku period, a woman and her daughter are raped and murdered by soldiers during a time of civil war. Afterwards, a series of samurai returning from the war through that area are found mysteriously dead with their throats torn out. The governor calls in a wild and fierce young hero to quell what is evidently an Onryō ghost.

Ten years before the outbreak of the Second World War in Asia, a Japanese Go master and his Chinese rival meet in China to play a game of Go (loosely described as an Asian version of chess). It soon becomes evident that the Chinese master's son is the most talented player that the Japanese master has ever encountered, and he convinces the boy's father to let him bring the child back to Japan to train him as a professional Go player. Years pass, and as the young Chinese master grows to maturity in Japan, the Japanese invasion of China forces him to choose between his triumphant career and his loyalty to his native country. His decision is complicated by his marriage to the daughter of the Japanese master, with whom he has produced a child. His choice will profoundly alter the lives of two families. Their saga serves as a reflection of the tragic relations between their two great countries, and the possibility of reconciliation and healing.

Shinnosuke is introduced to Shizu as a prospective marriage partner, but he falls in love with her widowed sister Oyu. Convention forbids Oyu to marry because she has to raise her son as the head of her husband's family. Oyu convinces Shinnosuke and Shizu to marry so that she can remain close to Shinnosuke.

Oshima’s magisterial epic, centering on the ambivalent surviving heir of the Sakurada clan, uses ritual and the microcosm of the traditional family to trace the rise and fall of militaristic Japan across several decades.