Movies: Motomi Makiguchi

Hirayama is content with his life as a toilet cleaner in Tokyo. Outside of his structured routine, he cherishes music on cassette tapes, books, and taking photos of trees. Through unexpected encounters, he reflects on finding beauty in the world....

Shunsaku was paralyzed from the neck down at the young age of 36 by a spinal injury suffered in a motorcycle accident. A blind woman named Hanae arrives to be his caregiver. Despite her frustrations with Shusaku's ill-nature and verbal abuse, Hanae a...

In a Japan of the near future, the government program Plan 75 encourages senior citizens to be voluntarily euthanized to remedy a super-aged society. An elderly woman whose means of survival are vanishing, a pragmatic Plan 75 salesman, and a young Fi...

Following the life of Japanese artist and poet Yumeji Takehisa through the imagining of an encounter with a beautiful widow with a dark past....

Utsumi and Seto's daily routine is to spend their afterschool hours just jabbering with one another along a riverbed. Getting excited over trivial word play, agonizing over the content of an email to be sent to a girl, and, at times, talking about a ...

Five short stories from five different directors set ten years in Japan's future....

Ko, a man in his late 30s, lives in the countryside with his wife and teenage son. Mitsuhiko, who runs a local car dealership, also stayed in his hometown. One day, their mutual friend Eisuke returns from a long military operation and their reunifica...

For 60 years, the group of detectives known as "Detective Office 5" has raised the bar for detective work. The agents of Detective Office 5 are a group of stellar detectives lead by the genius code breaker Detective 507. When an unknown client enlist...

Assistant police inspector Aida is assigned to investigate the murder of a former gang member. When a justice ministry official is killed days later in a similar manner, he begins to suspect that something bigger is going on......

A humorous wedding story fueled by a rather no-good father and son, disguised as the old and new “good guys.” The father Nobuo, and his son Tamio, are unable to mature, unable to break the parent-child roles, have no sense of responsibility, and keep...

A school bus driver's life is irrevocably altered when his young son is kidnapped and murdered....

Two brothers, Jinta and Wataru, are raised in a travelling circus. After an accident, Jinta decides to leave the circus and travels the countryside working as a con-man. After a run-in with a local gang of yakuza, he is invited to join their ranks, w...

A doll maker and his daughter Erika live in a remote mountain villa. When some thugs break in and murder Erika and disfigure the old doll maker, he sets about getting his revenge. He creates a life-size doll and has it possessed by Erika's spirit. Th...

The Rinkaiji family, by all appearances, is a well-to-do Japanese family. The father, Nariyuki, works in an elite corporation, which gives his wife Yoshiko status in their suburban neighborhood. But the daughter Sugina, who herself has secretly stopp...

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Nursing home "Yuyoso". Many lonely old people live there, including botanist Taro Makiso, a physicist, an actor, a bar mom, and a chef. Maki has spent most of his life studying botany, and has lived without regard for entertainment, drinking, women, ...

Kei Omori is a caregiver who has left his previous job at a small-scale care service to come work at a large-scale nursing home. But he is unable to hide his tremendous discomfort with a management style that prioritizes efficiency and risk control i...

A member of the jieitai ("Self-Defense Force"; i.e. Japanese military) is on leave and finds a woman giving birth in a graveyard in the former Yoshiwara district. He takes her to an inn to gove birth, and stays on a few days as she recovers, but beco...