Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets

Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets 1971

7.40

An experimental, psychedelic odyssey through Japanese subculture experienced via the eyes of a disillusioned young man, who must contend with intense familial dysfunction, psychosexual alienation, and existentialist malaise.

1971

This Transient Life

This Transient Life 1970

7.50

Near a remote Buddhist monastery, a young man falls in love with his sister and gets her pregnant. After a monk finds out, the young man becomes an assistant to a master sculptor, only to proceed to complicate matters with his affairs.

1970

Demons

Demons 1971

7.70

Tells the story of the samurai Gengobe, who seeks revenge after falling prey to the schemes of a geisha and her husband.

1971

Death by Hanging

Death by Hanging 1968

7.40

A Korean man is sentenced to death in Japan but somehow survives his execution, sending the authorities into a panic about what to do next.

1968

Funeral Parade of Roses

Funeral Parade of Roses 1969

7.60

In 1960s Tokyo, Gonda owns a bar in which the gay, cross-dresser, and trans scenes meet. Gonda is in a relationship with the madam of the bar, Leda. As the younger Eddie starts a passionate affair with Gonda, she ignites the jealousy of Leda, unaware of another kind of history between them.

1969

Pastoral: To Die in the Country

Pastoral: To Die in the Country 1974

7.50

A director faces creative block while working on his latest film – a reimagination of his adolescence growing up in a mountain village in rural Japan.

1974

Typhoon Club

Typhoon Club 1985

6.50

Offering a caustic immersion into the lives of disaffected junior high students on the cusp of adulthood, the film takes place over the five-day period before, during, and after a ferocious, seemingly liberating typhoon, which six of the students endure while marooned in their school.

1985

Zigeunerweisen

Zigeunerweisen 1980

6.60

A surreal period film following a university professor and his eerie nomad friend as they go through loose romantic triangles and face death in peculiar ways.

1980

Double Suicide

Double Suicide 1969

7.04

Successful and married with children, paper-mill owner Jihei knows better than to contradict the strict social and moral codes of 18th-century Japan. But when he meets the lovely courtesan Koharu, he becomes a man obsessed. Koharu returns his love, even foregoing other customers while Jihei schemes to somehow buy her freedom. His efforts yield ruinous consequences for his business and his family life, and Koharu is meanwhile purchased by another client.

1969

Diary of a Shinjuku Thief

Diary of a Shinjuku Thief 1969

4.60

In Tokyo's Shinjuku district, the lives of a young man prone to theft, a young woman he meets at a bookstore, and a kabuki actor intersect.

1969

Himiko

Himiko 1974

7.10

The myth of the Sun Goddess who founded Japanese society is seen through the lens of a modern view of history.

1974

Poem

Poem 1972

7.00

The ascetic houseboy of a Japanese lawyer bears witness to the secretive sexual relationship between the lawyer's assistant and the maid, the lawyer's wife's sexual dissatisfaction, and the arrival of the lawyer's brother, who has a plan for the family's land and property.

1972

Double Suicide of Sonezaki

Double Suicide of Sonezaki 1978

6.80

Suicide has long been used as a form of social protest in Japan. In this film, set in 1703, samurai culture is being transformed by the emergence of a new merchant class. Elements of the social contract are beginning to unravel, and some unscrupulous people took undue advantage of these changes before the social order was re-created. In this story, a rich merchant gives his clerk an I.O.U. instead of wages. When the impoverished clerk presents the paper to the merchant at the agreed upon time asking for payment, the man flies into a rage and pretends he never wrote it and claims the clerk is trying to defraud him. Then he sets his henchmen on the clerk to administer a beating.

1978

I Are You, You Am Me

I Are You, You Am Me 1982

6.60

9th-graders Kazuo and Kazumi take a tumble at a temple in a small seacoast town in Japan. Through supernatural intervention, their minds and bodies are switched, and the result is a touching and hilarious coming-of-age comedy as they attempt to survive the pressures of junior high school life.

1982

Distant Thunder

Distant Thunder 1981

6.80

A young man living on growing tomatoes in a greenhouse in a residential area. Tomato cultivation is as doomed as his personal life where he tries to keep alive his romance with the eccentric Kaede and parents selected fiancee Ayako.

1981

Third Base

Third Base 1978

6.25

Third and Shinbunbu embark on a plan to make money by Third becoming a pimp and Shinbunbu a prostitute.

1978

The Youth Killer

The Youth Killer 1976

6.60

Though his parents help him run the family business, Jun still feels persecuted by their love; when they bar him from meeting with his girlfriend, tensions increase.

1976

Ecstasy of the Angels

Ecstasy of the Angels 1972

5.50

A militant revolutionary group is torn apart by betrayal as its members descend into paranoia and sexual decadence.

1972

Music

Music 1972

5.00

A young woman undergoes psychiatric treatment after she no longer hears music and develops sexual hang-ups.

1972