Nobuko Otowa Movies

A Japanese teenager travels to New Caledonia in search of the fabled "island closest to heaven" that her late father had told her about.

A young Japanese-American man arrives at his grandmother's old hometown in Yamaguchi, begins to stay at her family's elite but dysfunctional...

The body of Sakai Hatsuko, a woman of 23 who has been slain with a knife, has been found in a forest. Some days later, Ueda Hiroshi, a 19-year-old...

After over 50 years of wandering up and down Japan, finally in the 1970s, the rough-hewn blind shamisen player and folk-song collector named...

Shuji was once a feared member of the Yakuza crime syndicate, but he's reformed his ways, abandoned his old life and left the city for a small...

Gen is a lonely orphan boy. His sole sense of companionship comes from an imaginary friend, the god Prince Fudo-Myo. Prince Fudo-Myo comes to the...

The film consists of three short stories. Tomiko, the heroine of the first story, "The Flower Girl" (dir. Kozaburo Yoshimura), is a little girl who...

A young woman is forced by circumstance into a loveless marriage while still in love with another. This episodic tale follows their story through...

A woman looks after her father in law.

The film is a series of vignettes from Taiji Tonoyama's life and film clips, interspersed with a dialogue to camera by Nobuko Otowa, addressing the...

Japan, February 1868. As the Tokugawa shogunate declines and the power of Emperor Meiji grows, Gonzo, a soldier of the Restoration Army, returns to...

Shows the devastation caused by the atomic bomb, and by use of a fictional storyline, portrays the struggle of the ordinary Japanese people in...

The ship Kaijin Maru is left adrift after losing all means of navigation in a storm. The four people on the ship are becoming increasingly desperate...

A seasoned prosecutor uncovers the perfect crime committed by a young lawyer.

A group of five rookie insurance salespersons, driven to desperation by the impossibility of their work in Japan's failing postwar economy, form a...

Follows the story of an insurance company executive from Tokyo, Mr. Mito, who is demoted to the Osaka office. He takes a room at a small inn and...

Ginko, a poor cobbler's daughter, becomes a geisha to support her family. She passes from one geisha house to the next, trying to find love and hope...

Haru, an aging scriptwriter, has isolated himself somewhere in the woods of Nagano to work on his first novel. As the last surviving member of his...

Postwar Tokyo. Pin and Toku live in the squatter area of Kappanuma. Pin and Toku are avid gamblers. They take in Tsuru, a slightly demented woman who...