Movies: Ayako Wakao

When a theater troupe's master visits his old flame, he unintentionally sets off a chain of unexpected events with devastating consequences. A remake of Ozu's own silent film The Story of Floating Weeds (1934)....

The lives of five prostitutes employed at a Japanese brothel while the nation is debating the passage of an anti-prostitution law....

Tied to a mountain between her brutalizing spouse and her secret lover, disaster strikes; the authorities accuse her of murder and prompt a confession....

Otsuya, the daughter of a rich merchant, elopes with her lover Shinsuke, an employee of her father's. During their flight, Otsuya's beauty attracts the gaze of Seikichi, a mysterious master tattooist who sees her pristine white skin as the perfect ca...

In 1939, Sakura Nishi is a young army nurse who is sent to the field hospitals in China during the Sino-Japanese war. She has to assist the surgeon Dr. Okabe with an incredible number of amputations. In the crowded wards, she gives sympathy to some o...

With a price on his head, Ichi seeks tranquillity in a favorite village. Since his last visit, it has fallen prey to Boss Masagoro, the son of a merchant rumored to have stolen gold from the shogunate. The boss has hired Yojimbo as his hard-drinking ...

In Edo Japan, a kabuki actor seeks revenge against the three men who drove his parents to their deaths years ago....

The four principals in a love affair collide when jealousy, blackmail and suicide enter the picture....

Two poor, married farmers have recently lost their only child; after a freak visitation, they pry open an alien cocoon to greet their new daughter....

Eiko seeks out Miyoharu, a geisha, and asks to be her apprentice. When she is ready to receive clients, both women want the right to refuse certain men....

Yuko is sent to the coastal regions to be raised away from the rest of her sophisticated family where she finds out from her ill grandmother that she is not who she thought she was....

On his release from prison a young yakuza, along with his brother, decides to turn his back on criminal life instead of taking over the position of his recently deceased father, boss of the Asahina clan. But their exit proves more difficult than plan...

Fascinated with women from an early age, Yonosuke had his first sexual encounter at the age of seven. From that day on, he recklessly and forwardly pursues women, feeding his fascination and experience. As Yonosuke's salacious behavior brings much ca...

Japan, 1701. A group of samurai become rônin after their lord is forced to commit seppuku for assaulting a court official, who will become the target of a merciless revenge....

On the eve of the Russo-Japanese war at the beginning of the 20th century, small-town girl Okane has married an old wealthy man to escape a life of poverty....

Utsugi, a seventy-seven-year-old man of refined tastes who is recovering from a stroke, discovers that, while his body is decaying, his libido still rages on -- unwittingly sparked by the gentle, kindly attentions of his daughter-in-law Satsuko, a ch...

A young man is determined to have as many affairs as possible but not to get married. One of his conquests is of a different mind however. For she is pregnant and so he agrees to live with her. But he misses very much the other younger girl whom he s...

A young girl is rigorously trained in the feminine arts so that she can become a geisha. As she struggles through life, she learns to live not just as a woman but as a complete person....

The disturbing story of a physician who conducted the first operation with general anaesthetic, and the women in his life who are both so determined to win his love that they volunteer as subjects for his experiments...

Satoko is a mistress by trade or fate: when her master, the silkscreen artist of the Kohoan Temple in Kyoto, dies, she is given to the temple's lascivious head priest Kikuchi. She is drawn to a melancholy young acolyte, Jinen, who has observed the pr...