Movies: Chōko Iida

A bad day gets worse for young detective Murakami when a pickpocket steals his gun on a hot, crowded bus. Desperate to right the wrong, he goes undercover, scavenging Tokyo’s sweltering streets for the stray dog whose desperation has led him to a lif...

Doctor Sanada treats gangster Matsunaga after he is wounded in a gunfight, and discovers that he is suffering from tuberculosis. Sanada tries to convince Matsunaga to stay for treatment, which would drastically change his lifestyle. They form an unea...

A silk factory worker is persuaded to support her son's education up to a college level despite their poverty. Many years later, she travels to Tokyo to visit her son....

A poor rickshaw driver finds himself helping a young woman and her son after the woman's husband dies suddenly....

In Depression-era Tokyo, a young man struggles to provide for his family after he is fired from his job....

An errant salaryman's son gets lost until a man from the Tokyo tenements brings him to vendor Tane, who's reluctant to let the kid board....

Fumiko, mother of two children and wife of an unfaithful man, shares her family life with her budding vocation as a poet. The beginning of her successful literary career coincides with her divorce and her breast cancer diagnosis. In the last stage of...

When a young man inherits his father's lucrative business, he cheats the system to set up three of his college friends with jobs....

An aging actor returns to a small town with his troupe and reunites with his former lover and illegitimate son, a scenario that enrages his current mistress and results in heartbreak for all....

In Depression-era Tokyo, a struggling middle-aged single father with a young son comes across a homeless young lady and convinces a bar owner to take her in....

On the night the shogunate's treasury was breached, the guard Utsugi had already been taken down. His colleague Ryunosuke felt responsible and decided to catch the culprit, not only for the sake of the beautiful wife of Utsugi, Chika, but also for hi...

Considered one of the finest late Naruses and a model of film biography, A Wanderer’s Notebook features remarkable performances by Hideko Takamine – Phillip Lopate calls it “probably her greatest performance” – and Kinuyo Tanaka as mother and daughte...

Oiwa has been searching for the one who killed her father for a long time. She comes to Yedo and sees a man named Naosuke. The film is based on the kabuki classic: Toukaidou Yotsuya Kaidan (1826) written by Tsuruya Nanboku and is one of the most famo...

An unemployed Japanese man and his two sons wander the industrial flatlands of Depression-era Tokyo, until he chances upon an old friend and befriends a woman and her daughter, who are in a similar predicament....

An aging geisha, whose angry teenage son is ashamed of her profession, works alongside a young geisha, resentful of her family for forcing her into a life of ignominy....

Three young women make a suicide pact, but they grow to have a better understanding of themselves....

A young woman, who must support her father as a middle-aged man's mistress, finds herself falling in love with a student closer to her age....

After the death of her husband, an elderly woman and her youngest, unmarried daughter are forced to sell their house to cover his debts and decide to move in with one of the former's children, each of whom is scarcely happy to accommodate....

"The Dancing Girl of Izu" tells of the story between a young male student who is touring the Izu Peninsula and a family of traveling dancers he meets there, including their youngest girl. The student finds the naïve girl attractive even though he eve...

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