The Friends

Investigative reporter Hayakawa Junko visits a town that was once the scene of a scandal involving mass prostitution to cover the activities of high school girls at motels. What Junko sees there is a flood of sexual promiscuity among high school girls that is even more shocking than what has been reported in the media. During her investigation, Junko hears a rumor that it is a "high school version of Romeo and Juliet," in which two high school students, Ryuichi and Yuki, fell in love but their families opposed their relationship, so they cut off each other's little fingers.

This comedic piece centers on a trio of sisters—Rei Okamoto, Nahomi Oka, and Tamaki Katsura—whose personalities are nothing if not intense. Working as hostesses, they put their bodies on the line to make money, ultimately rising to the top by capitalizing on a very particular "special talent."

Physically separated from her father and at odds with her distraught mother, a girl must negotiate her own passage to maturity.

A high school science teacher is the butt of all his students' jokes, until their bus is hijacked on a school trip. But something more sinister lurks beneath the surface: he's building an atomic bomb in his apartment.

A salaryman faces a major life change as his firm undergoes financial difficulties. To add to his troubles, a man claiming to be his long-estranged father shows up at his house requesting shelter. One of the best of Somai's seriocomic studies of the messiness of family life.

Akira is haunted by a "bouncing ball" song that he remembers his mother singing when he was a small child, and now on the verge of a sexually active adulthood, he wants to find the origins of the song. The young man ostensibly wanders into a time-warp in which aspects from his childhood and adulthood mix together. In this never-never land he comes across a beautiful woman/witch who is lost inside the labyrinth of her mansion, just as the young man is lost in the labyrinth of time — and on some levels, perhaps the labyrinth of his subconscious.

A high-school girl inherits a declining yakuza organization, which seeks to repair its fortunes under her leadership.

A hulking man from the country pursues his beloved to the underworld of Tokyo nightclubs, where he finds work as a sideshow wrestler and becomes involved with a faded opera singer.

Iori, taken from an orphanage by a family for domestic work, runs away and is adopted and raised by two young men. Ten years later, she crosses paths with her former step-sister, who is soon poisoned to death, Iori being the prime suspect.

A call-girl named Yumi and Tetsuro, a married man with a debt to the yakuza, have a violent rendezvous in a cheap love hotel. Years later, haunted by the memory of that night, they reconnect and begin a strange love affair. Determined to finish what they started, they return to the scene of their first macabre passion.

A young man tries to overcome the hostility of his girlfriend's father, a tuna fisherman, by getting the father to teach him the trade's secrets.

A pampered young model is killed in a traffic accident. Given the chance to return to earth, she becomes involved with the advertising executive who is trying to cover up her death. A blend of fantasy and trenchant realism in which Somai uses the ethereal glow of advertising images to comment on the transience of life.

Offering a caustic immersion into the lives of disaffected junior high students on the cusp of adulthood, the film takes place over the 5-day period before, during, and after a ferocious, seemingly liberating typhoon, which six of the students endure while marooned in their school.

Though his parents help him run the family business, Jun still feels persecuted by their love; when they bar him from meeting with his girlfriend, tensions increase.

In the mid-1970s, a small group of friends are living in a Japanese town near an American air force base, their lives revolve around sex, drugs and rock 'n roll. The near-plotless story weaves a vividly raw, image-intensive journey through the daily monotony of drug-induced hallucinations, vicious acts of violence, overdoses, suicide, and group sex.