Ayako Wakao – MRQE

Jeongyeom

Sat, 23 Aug 2025 04:00:00 +0000

In this Japanese drama, a housewife falls in love with a female model and embarks upon a lesbian relationship. When she must share her new lover with a male lover, the housewife becomes confused. She must also deal with her husband. Eventually all four enter into a suicide pact, but of them, she is the only one to survive.

Manji

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 04:00:00 +0000

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

Nihonbashi

Sat, 23 Aug 2025 04:00:00 +0000

Ichikawa’s 1956 adaptation of Nihonbashi was the first to take the work of Kyoka Izumi until then regarded as a writer of common tragic melodramasand re-evaluate it as a tanbi-ha work of decadence, aestheticism, and intrigue. Ichikawa’s film presents the tragic plot of the young geisha who is unable to enact her love for a man publicly in any way other than a histrionic story of torment, a heart-rending tale of lovers being crushed by fate. Instead, Ichikawa shows the contest of wills that transpires as two geisha, Oko and Kiyoha fight for the top spot in Nihonbashi, the pinnacle of the Tokyo geisha world. Nihonbashi is an elegant, if steely, exposition of manners. The young doctor, Shinzo Katsuragi, is the object of affection for both women, but appears to be more the choice reward for the plotting and thieving of these two early modern superwomen, than a lover they swoon over.

Zatôichi to Yôjinbô

Tue, 26 Aug 2025 04:00:00 +0000

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 enforcer, but Yojimbo is both a spy for the shogunate, trying to find the gold, and in love with the merchant’s unwilling mistress, Umeno. Ichi hires on as the merchant’s masseur and buys Umeno’s freedom with his employer’s own money. This embarrasses Yojimbo who withdraws from a pact with Ichi to stir up trouble between father and son and their gangs. As the two sides fight, Ichi finds the gold and sets up a final set of confrontations.

Senba zuru

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 04:00:00 +0000

The entangled relations between the son of a seductive tea-ceremony teacher and the women in his father’s life.
Based on the novel by Kawabata Yasunari.

Hanaoka Seishû no tsuma

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 04:00:00 +0000

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

Akai tenshi

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 05:00:00 +0000

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 of the soldiers, including sexually servicing one who has lost both arms and has no hope of returning home. She falls in love with Dr. Okabe, and follows him to the front, even though he is impotent from his morphine addiction.

Irezumi

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 04:00:00 +0000

A mysterious tattoo artist puts his masterpiece, a human-faced spider, on a kidnapped woman’s back. She and her lover are then forced into a conspiracy-born nightmare, where they face the danger of becoming the very evil they seek to escape. With each new bloody incident, the spider’s face seems to redden with ever-growing hunger.

Shin shinobi no mono

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 04:00:00 +0000

[Period covered: 1595-1600] Third film in the famous shinobi no mono series. We last saw ninja Ishikawa Goemon (Raizo Ichikawa), as he was about to be boiled alive. But a good ninja is both hard to find, and even harder to kill. With the help of the enigmatic Hattori Hanzo, Goemon lives to skulk another day, and sets his sights on bringing down the warlord who tried to turn him into soup Toyotomi Hideyoshi. And as always, in the background, the suble hand of Tokugawa Ieyasu is pulling strings as he plots to rule all of Japan!

Shin shikôtei

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 04:00:00 +0000

In 221 BC, Qin Shihuangdi conquered the rest of China. Qin’s great accomplishments and also his serious faults are showed in this film. Qin adopted autocratic dictatorship and led a luxurious life: abolition of feudalism and the centralization of power in the form of a now-hereditary bureaucracy loyal to himself; burning books and burying scholars; the construction of a sumptuous palace for his concubines and also the Great Wall.