Hisako Takihana

After years on the road establishing his reputation as Japan's greatest fencer, Takezo returns to Kyoto. Otsu waits for him, yet he has come not for her but to challenge the leader of the region's finest school of fencing. To prove his valor and skill, he walks deliberately into ambushes set up by the school's followers.

Two brothers run a factory canning crabs. The elder brother Kotaro is righteous and insists on honesty. The younger brother is fixated on money. They are polar opposites. When a boat sails out looking for crab and does not return one day the brothers begin to argue over how to run their facility. They had just received a large order from a foreign country and had obtained a loan from a lender that needed to be repaid.

The relationship between Tetsuro, a university student from a disgraced, burdened family, and Shino, a waitress supporting her impoverished relatives. The couple decides to marry despite the significant emotional and social hardships each faces, viewing their love as a means to overcome the shame and despair inherited from their pasts.

In this downbeat, emotionally gripping drama, a lone guardian of some small huts on one of the northernmost, small islands off Japan remembers his once happier past and the events that destroyed everyone he held dear.

In 1945, in a Shanghai filled with a palpable sense of unease as the war was still raging, Atsuko Kijima and Ryuji Kudo fell in love and exchanged promises of marriage. Ryuji was deployed shortly thereafter, and after the war ended, he was taken to Siberia as a prisoner of war. Atsuko, who had returned to Tokyo, clung to the promise she had made with Ryuji—that if he were safe, he would “come to the garden of St. Nicholas Cathedral at noon on Christmas Day.” Relying on that promise, she went to St. Nicholas Cathedral at noon on Christmas Day in both 1946 and 1947, but Ryuji never appeared.

The first story concerns an attractive young woman who works in a Tokyo nightclub. Her plan for a solid financial future has a double whammy. In the second story, a beautiful young woman is employed by an unscrupulous real estate agent to convince male clients to invest in worthless property. The last story is about a widowed geisha who has no real financial worries and who falls in love with a forger.

Based on a story by Akiyuki Nosaka.