Akira Emoto Movies

Director Issei Shibata delivers this adrenalin-fueled thriller about a rash of murders all involving people with the surname "Sato," and a desperate high school student with that name who becomes trapped in a parallel world while being forced to participate in a lethal game of tag. All across Japan, people with the last name "Sato" are perishing in bizarre accidents, dying freakish deaths, or simply taking their own lives. Though distracted high school student Tsubasa Sato is too busy tending to his catatonic sister in the hospital and attempting to get through to his alcoholic father to take note of the trend, the Sato curse seems to strike him hard when, after engaging in a fight with a vicious gangster, he awakens in a parallel world where everything - and everyone - are just slightly different than they used to be. In this world, a masked King occupies an enormous tower in the center of the city, and he's decreed a public game of tag in which anyone named "Sato" is targeted for death by his legion of hooded minions. With the city sirens sound, the onigokko (chasing game) is on. Anyone who successfully eludes the pursuers for a few hours each day of the week is to be granted any wish they want. Luckily, Tsubasa excels at chasing games, and before long he's discovered a curious link between this parallel world and his former reality: when a contestant is killed in the parallel world, his counterpart in the real world perishes as well. Now, as the siren sounds and the chase begins, Tsubasa hits the ground running in hopes of reaching his sister before the army of masked killers do. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

The material and spiritual sides of one man's life are reflected in a game that allowed him to become a hero in this historical drama from Chinese director Tian Zhuangzhuang. Wu Qingyuan (Chang Chen) was born to a wealthy family in China, and as a boy he revealed a remarkable talent for the centuries-old game known as Go. Wu's skill for the game was so great that in the 1920s he was given the opportunity to travel to Japan, where he would learn from the grand masters of Go and compete with champions from around the world. Wu spent most of the rest of his life in Japan, where his life was bordered on one side by Go and on the other by his study of Zen; however, Wu was also a Chinese man living in Japan during a time that the two nations were often in violent conflict, and he found himself viewing some of the most crucial and traumatic events of Japanese history through the eyes of an outsider. Wu Qingyuan received its American premiere at the 2006 New York Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

An aimless twenty-year old drowning himself in booze after a recent break-up begins to come around while piecing together the life of the aunt he never knew he had in director Tetsuya Nakashima's adaptation of Muneki Yamada's original novel. Unable to deal with his latest break-up, Sho Kawajiri (Eita) has locked himself away in his Tokyo apartment to dull the pain in an emotion-numbing sea of alcohol and pornography. When his estranged father suddenly appears to present Sho with the ashes of the aunt that he had never known, the crestfallen son soon finds his sorrow replaced with a driving curiosity about his mysterious Aunt Matsuko (Miki Nakatani). Later, when Sho travels to his deceased aunt's ramshackle apartment, it begins to appear Matsuko is reaching out from the great beyond to take her nephew a guided tour of her tragic life. As a child, Matsuko's father lavished attention on the girl's chronically-ill sister as the healthier Matsuko sat love-starved on the sidelines. Though she would eventually grow to become a popular junior high school teacher in her hometown, Matsuko's career was cut unexpectedly short when she boldly took the blame for a theft that was actually committed by her prized pupil Ryu. In the years that followed, Matsuko's desperate search for love would lead her into a series of abusive relationships with me incapable of coping with her smothering affections. Later, after falling from grace as a sex worker and serving a stint in prison, Matsuko crosses paths with her favorite student Ryo and finally believes she has found true love. Unfortunately for Matsuko, Ryo has become a violent gangster, and the person she thought would finally bring the love she had always longed for soon abandons her. Now left alone in the world and bereft of the life-affirming love that once seemed so closely within reach, Matsuko wanders down a corrosive path of self-destruction that will eventually seal her own grim fate. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

A violent and outrageous revenge comedy with a thoughtful undercurrent, director Lee Sang-il's Scrap Heaven opens with three characters united by fate on the same city bus: toilet cleaner Tetsu (Jô Odagiri); police department administrative assistant Kasuya (Ryo Kase), who wants to work his way up into homicide; and pharmaceutical company employee Saki (Chiaki Kuriyama). The three strangers have ostensibly no connection to one another, save a shared presence on the bus one fateful night -- the night that a political secretary goes completely psychotic and decides to take the three passengers, at random, as hostages. He strong-arms the three into violent and sadistic mind games, including lethal versions of Rock, Paper, Scissors and Russian roulette. The perpetrator inflicts Kasuya with deep-seated psychological scars and shoots Tetsu, pushing the man to the brink of death. The gunman then turns the weapon on himself. Months later, Kasuya meets up with Tetsu once again, and saves him from a potentially lethal act of violence. The two men subsequently join forces and devise a wild plan to set up a revenge-for-hire business, designed to "right wrongs" for victimized persons. In the mean time, Saki is pouring all of her time and energy into the construction of a liquid bomb -- a project that threatens to invite further destruction. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide

Yuka (Hiromi Nagasaku) is an attractive young woman whose brother has recently died under mysterious circumstances. Shortly before his untimely death, Yuka got her first glimpse of his double, who has since moved into their apartment and taken his place. Hayasaki (Koji Yakusho) is a brilliant but mercurial scientist obsessed with perfecting a robot chair for the disabled, with wheels and mechanical arms that are supposed to function according to the "will" of the user. In his single-mindedness, he harangues his underlings and aggravates his employer, who is focused on the bottom line. After a co-worker tells Hayasaki about Yuka's experience, he finds himself being stalked by a doppelganger. At first, he thinks he is doomed, like Yuka's brother, and tries to avoid his double. Eventually, he loses his job, and control of his invention, and the doppelganger steps in to take care of everything. The double trashes Hayasaki's former lab, stealing the robot chair so the scientist can continue his work. The double also hires a young thug, Kimishima (Yusuke Santamaria), to work for them. The double says Kimishima is "just dumb enough not to find us alarming." But Hayasaki's fears come to the fore when the double takes advantage of Yuka's interest in him. And when his former employer, Aoki (Masahiro Toda), now disgraced, comes looking for a piece of the robot-chair action, the scientist finds himself uncertain who to trust. Doppelganger, a dark comedy directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure) from a script by Kurosawa and Ken Furusawa, was shown at the 2004 Rotterdam Film Festival. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide

Junji Sakamoto directs this taut spy thriller about the real-life abduction of Kim Dae Jung -- who would later be elected president of South Korea -- from a Tokyo hotel in 1973. Major Tomita (Koichi Sato) is a Japanese intelligence officer specializing in Korean matters. While tailing a North Korean spook, he learns that his attractive Korean teacher, Lee Jeong Mi (Yang Eun-yong), has been kidnapped by the South Korean Intelligence agency. Tomita negotiates for the freedom of Lee, who he learns was previously tortured by the same agency for protesting against strongman Park Jung Hee. Meanwhile, the Korean embassy gets the orders to kill Kim Dae Jung, known also by the codename "KT," who is living in exile in Japan. Tomita finds himself caught up in the scheme, privately realizing that the plot is wrong while participating nonetheless. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide

Can five teenage boys overcome clumsiness, inexperience, and the taunts of their classmates to become a champion team of synchronized swimmers? That's the key question in this comedy from Japan. Suzuki (Satoshi Tsumabuki) is an enthusiastic competitive swimmer who is the linchpin of his high school's swim team. However, lately there isn't much of a team to lead -- interest in swimming among the school's male students has dropped to almost zero, with Suzuki being the only one who still shows up for practice. When Sakuma (Kaori Manabe), a beautiful young teacher new to the school, takes over as swim coach, the men's team finds itself with a host of new members, but the new enthusiasm for swimming (and seeing Sakuma in a damp bathing suit) soon wanes when she unveils her dream project -- creating a boy's synchronized swimming team. While Suzuki remains loyal as always, before long only four other students remain to help make Sakuma's dream a reality -- math geek Kanazawa (Kuen Kondo), 98-pound-weakling Ohta (Akifumi Miura), athletically inept Sato (Hiroshi Tamaki), and timid Saotome (Takatoshi Kaneko), who hides the secret of his homosexuality from everyone at the school. Just as the team is starting to take shape, Sakuma is forced to take maternity leave, and with their first major public performance on the horizon, Suzuki and his teammates are driven to take advice wherever they can get it, ranging from a dolphin trainer at a water park to a group of aquatically inclined cross-dressers. By the way, if Kaori Manabe looks especially comfortable performing in a swimsuit, that's to be expected -- in Japan, she's best known as a high-profile bikini model. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Veteran filmmaker Kaneto Shindo, who was 86 at the time of making this film, tackles the graying of Japan's population. The film opens with Yasukichi (Rentaro Mikuni), a retired chemist who lives with his middle-aged daughter, Tokuko (Shinobu Otake), drunkenly decrying the younger generation's poor treatment of the elderly in his favorite drink hole. When the bar's matron (Naoko Otani) admonishes him for being too loud, he continues to drink and rant until he wets himself and passes out on the floor. He wakes up in a hospital, cared for by the doctor (Akira Emoto) who found him out cold in front of the bar. Yasukichi's loutish behavior suddenly changes. His daughter, however, does not buy it for a second. His drunken tirades have pushed away Tokuko's siblings and driven her to the brink of mental illness. She tells the old man that if it were up to her, she would leave him at the hospital. The clinic is not, as the doctor points out, a nursing home, and Tokuko grudgingly lets him return. Yet Yasukichi knows that an old folks home is in his future. About the same time, he becomes obsessed with the legend of Obasuteyama village near Nagano, where the elderly are supposedly left to die in the mountains. Yasukichi soon starts to see the nursing home and Obasuteyama's notorious traditions as being roughly the same. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide

This is the fifth adaptation of Junichiro Tanizaki's erotic novel about middle-aged professor Soichiro Anzai (Akira Emoto of Shall We Dance?). Anzai's diary reveals his frustrating interactions with his sexually repressed young wife Ikuko (Naomi Kawashima). To communicate to her, he leaves the diary key where she will find it, and she reads with fascination. When he invites photographer Kimura (Mikio Osawa) to dinner, Ikuko drinks too much, Anzai puts her to bed, sees her nude, and becomes aroused and makes love to her, despite her semi-conscious state. The next day, Ikuko reads about the incident in his diary, and as the situation steams up, she leaves her own diary where he will find it. Although the two never discuss their heightened passions, each is heard in voiceover while the diaries are read. Winner of the "Screenplay" award at the 1998 Santa Barbara Film Festival. ~ Bhob Stewart, All Movie Guide

Veteran filmmaker and perennial iconoclast Shohei Imamura directs this darkly comic tale about love, redemption, and a man's beloved pet eel. The film opens with Takuro Yamashita (Koji Yakusho), a seemingly normal salaryman, learning that his wife might be having an affair. When he catches the couple in flaganto delicto, he freaks out and brutally stabs them both to death. Eight years later, Yamashita is released on parole into the care of a Buddhist priest living in rural Chiba prefecture. Far away from his former life, yet still plagued with memories of his crime, Yamashita decides to start anew by opening a barbershop on a quiet road next to a canal. Though inward looking and self-conscious, he eventually befriends a bumptious but good-hearted day laborer, and a construction worker who's obsessed with UFOs. His most fateful encounter though is with a woman named Keiko (Misa Shimizu), who he discovers unconscious following a suicide attempt. Looking to put a few of her own demons to bed, Keiko decides to stay in this sleepy corner of Japan and help her savior with his barbershop. Initially against the idea -- she bears a striking resemblance to his dead spouse -- he eventually agrees and even grows to like having her around. This film won the Grand Prix at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide