Mikako Ichikawa Movies

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

Directors Suguru Takeuchi, Akio Jissoji, Hisayasu Sato, and Atsushi Kaneko team to adapt four stories by acclaimed early-20th Century Japanese mystery novelist Taro Hirai, who penned his suspenseful tales under the telling pseudonym Edogawa Ranpo. Maverick Japanese indie star Tadanoby Asano stars in all four segments of the macabre omnibus. Takeuchi's "Mars' Canal," sets things into motion as a naked man (Asano) wandering through a desolate alien landscape recounts a sexual encounter that quickly took a violent turn. The second segment, directed by Jissoji and entitled "Mirror Hell," finds detective Kogoro Akechi (Asano) investigating the mysterious deaths of two young women. Upon discovering that mirrors crafted by malevolently handsome stationary shop master Toru Itsuki (Hiroki Narimiya) and that the mirror-maker knew both of the victims intimately, the investigation takes an unsettling turn that leads the detective to believe the occult may be involved. Director Sato's "Caterpillar," which comprises the third segment of the film, follows a quadruple amputee war veteran (Nao Omori) who returns from the battlefield only to face sadistic abuse at the hands of his nubile but resentful wife (Yukiko Okamoto). As a local artist (Ryuhei Matsuda) begins to take a morbid interest in the couple's twisted relationship, Detective Akechi (Asano) does his best to crack the strange case. Kaneko's "Crawling Bugs" rounds out the frightful quartet of tales by detailing the psychotic coupling between a well-known actress (Tamaki Ogawa) and her introverted driver (Asano), who longs to satisfy the sultry starlet in the same manner as her rough-handed lover (again Asano). ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

Directed by Hiroshi Ando, Blue follows schoolgirls Kayako Kirishima (Mikako Ichikawa) and Masami Endo (Manami Konishi), who meet and quickly find that they've got something more than a mutual friendship between them. Though Kayako never believed herself to be a lesbian (and, in fact, recently lost her virginity to a male), she ends up sharing a kiss with Masami. Their feelings for one another are put to the test when Masami sets off to visit the man who had impregnated her sometime earlier, and Kayako is left on her own. ~ Tracie Cooper, All Movie Guide

Another Heaven, a Japanese supernatural crime drama directed by Joji Iida (director of Rasen, the first Ringu sequel), begins with cops on the scene of a bizarre homicide. A young man has been killed, his neck snapped, and there is a stew cooking on the stove. When a young detective, Manabu (Yosuke Eguchi), arrives on the scene, he quickly discovers that the corpse's brain is missing, and before long, the horrified policemen realize where the brain is. Before long, more brainless victims turn up, with their brains cooking nearby, and it becomes clear to Manabu and his grizzled older colleague (Yoshio Harada) that they have a culinary-inclined serial killer on their hands. Meanwhile, Manabu is seduced by a friendly ex-con, Asako (Kunihiko Ida), but he's interested in the more refined Dr. Sasamoto (Mikako Ichikawa), who works in the police lab. The killer, a beautiful coed, goes on one last spree, and just when the police are about to track her down, she somehow switches bodies with a hapless young man. He taunts Manabu, leaving his mangled victims with dedications scrawled in blood. As Manabu struggles to unravel the mystery, he begins to suspect that one of the women he's involved with may be possessed by the killer. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide