Kyoko Kagawa Movies

Like his previous drama Maborosi (1995), Hirokazu Kore-eda's After Life is a brilliant meditation on death and memory. The premise of After Life is simple: over the span of a week, twenty-two souls arrive at a way station (which looks like an old junior high school) between life and death, where they are asked to choose just one memory to take into the afterlife. The new arrivals include an elderly woman, a rebellious dropout, a teenage girl, and a 70-year-old war veteran. Once they have chosen a memory, it is recreated and filmed by the staff of the way station, using all the tricks and illusions of cinema: cotton balls are used to mimic clouds, a fan is used for a summer breeze. In preparation for this project, Kore-eda interviewed 500 people from all walks of life about their memories. The film freely cuts between footage of these interviews, actors improvising, and actors reading scripts. Just as Kore-eda fuses documentary elements with a fictional narrative, we see over the course of the film how memories are distorted, improved on, and revised; and it is these subjectively constructed memories that the new arrivals value most. This film is not a typical Hollywood feel-good film; but its unhurried pace and lack of melodrama, like its subject, may linger in the memory long afterwards. ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi

Veteran director Kei Kumai spins this tale about Toyoichi Otomo (Eiji Okuda) who suffers from psychological and spiritual troubles after a horrific industrial accident. He lives with his elderly mother (Kyoko Kagawa) and wife (Mieko Harada) near Mt. Aso in rural Kyushu. He seeks solace in a small religious group run by Buddhist nun Chishu-bo (Keiko Kishi) who claims to be the 68th descendant of famed 11th century poet Izumi Shikibu. The members of her sect regard her as a living saint. Yet instead of balming his soul, she riles his libido by playing a sexual cat-and-mouse game with the fragile Toyoichi. When she does bed him, it leads to a miracle healing -- followed by a terrible calamity. ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi

In this Japanese film, the Shimoda police station gets a new judo instructor who soon finds himself in love with the previous instructor's daughter. This makes another student so jealous that he challenges the new sensei to a duel. The young upstart is quickly put into his place. Later the instructor loses his job for fighting with naval officers. The young man again challenges him, and this time he wins. He also wins the young woman's heart. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

In this Japanese costumer set in the 17th century, three powerful families endeavor to keep three sacred scrolls from ever being pieced together in one place, as they contain the necessary information to overthrow the government. These scrolls are coveted by several greedy, power-mad clans who will do anything to get them; one of these clans even hires a samurai wizard to work magic on their behalf. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

In this Japanese moral tale set in the 18th-century, a man becomes obsessed with winning the love a geisha girl. His fixation loses face for his family and culminates in the murder of a shop owner's wife. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

In this Japanese melodrama set in 1941, a baby girl is born blind just as her father is sent off to fight for his country. Wanting to cure her child, the mother convinces a local medico to do the surgery, but before he can, he too goes to war. Years pass and the doctor finally performs the surgery. Unfortunately, it fails and the girl accepts her blindness. Soon after, she falls for a blind boy and the two happily marry. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

Rugged Japanese mountains provide the setting for this grim drama that begins as three young men embark upon a climb. Tragedy follows when one of the fellows gets confused in the fog and walks off a cliff. A year passes and the cousin of the deceased goes up the mountain accompanied by one of the original party members. Eventually, the suspicious cousin demands that the fellow reveal the truth about his cousin's "accidental" death. The man freely confesses to the murder and the cousin then gets his revenge. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

In this engaging drama, acclaimed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa deftly splices together the nuances of hypocrisy, old feudal misconceptions lingering in modern corruption, and Shakespeare's Hamlet. The rotten corporate world is taken on by Koichi Nishi (Toshiro Mifune), who is looking for revenge in the death of his father. Koichi is a private secretary to a government official, and in the opening scene, at Koichi's wedding to the official's disabled daughter, a special cake is brought in which jolts those present -- it reminds them of the suicide that paved the way for their current positions of power. Then the police arrive and arrest one of the wedding guests. Unknown to the others, Koichi is the hidden force behind all the strange happenings that begin to sting their consciences and ruin their lives. Ghostly figures and would-be killers in the dark streets contrast with shining corporate offices as the plot maneuvers to its tragic conclusion. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

Women in Prison is a Japanese spin on the traditional Hollywood "babes behind bars" opus. Filmed in semi-documentary fashion, the narrative focuses on several particularly troubled and troublesome female inmates. Tying the various plot strands together is a chief guard known as "The Angel," who does her best to rehabilitate one of the younger prisoners, a sad victim of circumstance. The frankness of the film's lesbian subplot was quite an eye-opener for American audiences of the mid-1950s. Women in Prison debuted in New York as part of a festival of Japanese films assembled by the Museum of Modern Art. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Set in Japan during the 17th century, this conventional costume drama tells of the persecution of Christian converts in the feudal society of the time. Christianity alone was not the target, it was only one part of the perceived threat of Western civilization. Christofa Ferrera (Osamu Takizawa) is a Portuguese priest who is tortured and ends up giving forth the names of converts. In order to "test" the suspected convert's true faith, the person is asked to step on an image of Christ, the worst possible offense. If the individual refused to desecrate the image in that way, he or she is imprisoned, tortured, and executed. Eventually, the Portuguese priest gains courage from the actions of the laity but the killing does not stop. This was one of the entries in competition at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

Kenji Mizoguchi's masterpiece opens in 11th-century Japan with an aristocratic woman Tamaki traveling through the woods with her daughter Anju, son Zushio, and maid. Through flashbacks, we learn that her husband, Taira no Masauji, was a local governor who was exiled because of his honesty and integrity. Before he leaves, he gives his son an amulet of Kannon, the goddess of mercy, and tells him, "Without mercy, man is like a beast. Men are created equal, everyone is entitled to happiness." On their journey to reunite with their husband/father, they are ambushed by kidnappers, who sell the mother as a prostitute and the two children as slaves to the corrupt Sansho (Eitaro Shindo). As adults, Zushio (Yoshiaki Hanayagi) and his sister Anju (Kyoko Kagawa) continue to toil as servants. Anju learns that her mother has become a courtesan on remote Sado-island. Though Zushio became Sansho's most trusted and most brutal aide; he manages to escape at Anju's behest. He finds sanctuary at a local monastery while Anju, looking to avoid the inevitably violent retribution, drowns herself in a lake. Seeking justice, Zushio petitions the Prime Minister, a desperate act that usually results in imprisonment or death. Yet his pleas prove more successful than he ever dreamed. When he finally has the power to thwart evil Sansho and reunify his family, he learns that he is tragically too late. ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi

As with much of director Yasujiro Ozu's work, a plot summary of this film does not do justice to the emotional power that Ozu lends to this sad, understated tale. An elderly couple, Shukichi (Chishu Ryu) and Tomi Hirayama (Chieko Higashiyama), leaves their small coastal village in southern Japan to visit their married children in Tokyo. Their eldest son, Koichi (So Yamamura), a doctor running a clinic in a working-class part of town, is too busy to show them around town, and their eldest daughter is occupied with her beauty salon. Only their widowed daughter-in-law, Noriko, played memorably by Setsuko Hara, is willing to take time off work to show the couple the sights of Tokyo. The older children arrange for their parents to visit Atami Hot Springs, but the unimpressed couple soon returns to Tokyo. Tomi stays with her daughter-in-law while Shukichi goes out drinking with some of his buddies, and the bunch complains about their vague sense of disappointment toward their children. Later, he stumbles into his daughter Shige's (Haruko Sugimura ) house late at night. On the way back to their village, tragedy strikes. The callous inattention that son and daughter paid to their parents becomes unamendable. Shige and Koichi quickly return to their busy lives in Tokyo after the funeral, as Noriko and youngest daughter Kyoko (Kyoko Kagawa) remain. ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi