Tappei Shimokawa

High Seas Hijack

Terrorists hijack an oil tanker and threaten to blow it up unless Japan meets their demands.

Bark at the Sun

The detectives of Nana-magari station investigate a wide variety of crimes in 70s Japan, ranging from the mundane to the absolutely bizarre.

Portrait of Hell

The story, set in the Heian era, depicts the conflict between Korean painter Yoshihide (Nakadai) and his Japanese patron, the cruel and egotistical daimyo Horikawa (Nakamura). It is based on the 1918 short story Hell Screen by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa.

Komugīro no tenshi suzume to shōnen

After the Rain

A group of travelers is stranded in a small country inn when the river floods during heavy rains. As the bad weather continues, tensions rise amongst the trapped travelers.

A Distant Cry from Spring

The quiet life of a mother and her young son living on a farm in Hokkaido is changed by the arrival of a man who ignites flames of romance in the heart of the mother and shows her boy the importance of grit and kindness, but then he leaves with the autumn wind.

Dodes'ka-den

On a Tokyo dump’s shantytown edge, interwoven vignettes follow residents scraping by: a boy who “drives” an imaginary trolley, a homeless father and son designing a dream house, a young woman brutalized at home, drunks, schemers, and saints of small kindnesses. Kurosawa crafts a ragged mosaic of hardship, fantasy, and flickers of grace that keep people moving forward.

13 Assassins

Gathering a band of 13, Inspector General Shmada Shinzaemon sets out on a death-defying journey to cut down the shogun’s half-brother, Matsudaira Naritsugu.

The Sands of Kurobe

Kitagawa is an engineer charged with construction of a gigantic tunnel through the Japan Alps for the transportation of equipment in the building of the massive Kurobe Dam. The tunnel crosses an earthquake fault and Kitagawa is beleaguered not only by cave-ins and flooding, but by strife between management and the workers's union. Adding to Kitagawa's stress is the knowledge that as his attention is pulled inexorably toward the tunnel construction, his youngest daughter is dying from leukemia.

Conflagration

Global South guerrillas hijack the Japanese oil tanker Arabian Light, threatening to blow it up in Tokyo Bay, unless the Cabinet complies with an economically devastating ultimatum.