Movies: Chizuko Takamori

Based on a novel by Tsutomu Mizukami, this haunting melodrama focuses on a young bamboo worker who takes his father's prostitute as his wife....

The womanising master of a run-down dojo hires an unemployed samurai to make himself look good instead of learning the skills himself. He lives to regret this laziness when he falls in love with the daughter of a higher class samurai and is informed...

A fugitive christian "saint" (female, of course!) and a sadistic drug-addled princess both have their eye on Kyoshiro. The fact that a bunch of ruthless smugglers also want him dead is the least of his problems!...

As winds of change sweep Japan, an honest man joins the Shinsengumi out of admiration for its leader, and because he wants to live and die as a samurai. However, as his involvement grows, reality and idealism come into deadly conflict....

1962 Japanese movie...

One day, a funeral was held at one of the tenements in Asakusa. It was the only son of a wealthy merchant named Matasaburo, who had run away from home with a woman he was in love with and had been living here. But this funeral was actually a kyogen...

A decapitation at the hands of the shogun's monstrous misbegotten son kicks off the action and draws nomadic Nemuri Kyoshiro (Raizô Ichikawa) into more sword-fighting adventures when he's blamed for the beheading. Meanwhile, the head-chopper's mother...

A wandering gambler strolls into a village searching for his father's killer, unaware that the village is run by criminals who sell the poorest peasants into slavery....

19th century Japan, at the end of the Edo period. A samurai falls in love with a young woman while taking up arms to overthrow the local shogunate....