Shinji Sōmai

A high-school girl inherits a declining yakuza organization, which seeks to repair its fortunes under her leadership.

Offering a caustic immersion into the lives of disaffected junior high students on the cusp of adulthood, the film takes place over the 5-day period before, during, and after a ferocious, seemingly liberating typhoon, which six of the students endure while marooned in their school.

Three high-school students tangle with indulgent yakuza and lackadaisical police as they set out in search of the class bully, who has been kidnapped.

A government employee meets a hostess of a "pink club," and together they set out on a journey.

A salaryman faces a major life change as his firm undergoes financial difficulties. To add to his troubles, a man claiming to be his long-estranged father shows up at his house requesting shelter. One of the best of Somai's seriocomic studies of the messiness of family life.

A tale of two broken souls. A call-girl named Yumi, “night-blooming flower,” and Tetsuro, a married man with a debt to the yakuza, have a violent rendezvous in a cheap love hotel. Years later, haunted by the memory of that night, they reconnect and begin a strange love affair. Determined to finish what they started, they return to the scene of their first macabre passion. With a taste for wicked absurdity while coursing with undercurrents of operatic emotion, at times verging on a musical, Love Hotel is moved by the irrational forces that attract two bodies together.

Iori, taken from an orphanage by a family for domestic work, runs away and is adopted and raised by two young men. Ten years later, she crosses paths with her former step-sister, who is soon poisoned to death, Iori being the prime suspect.

A pampered young model is killed in a traffic accident. Given the chance to return to earth, she becomes involved with the advertising executive who is trying to cover up her death. A blend of fantasy and trenchant realism in which Somai uses the ethereal glow of advertising images to comment on the transience of life.

Physically separated from her father and at odds with her distraught mother, a girl must negotiate her own passage to maturity.

A delightful and moving coming-of-age story. One summer, three young boys take an increasing interest in an eccentric old man who lives alone in a house surrounded by an overgrown garden. The boys form a bond with the recluse and set about weeding and replanting the garden.

Aspiring to be admitted to a good university and to become a lawyer, Tasiro Yuusuke, a tenth-grader from Kyushu, enrolls in a prestigious high school in Tokyo. Plans are made for him to live in his uncle's house, part of which is rented out while his uncle is abroad on business. A realtor's mistakes leaves Tasiro sharing the house with Kei Yamaba, the most beautiful girl in the school, who is also his classmate. There is the risk that their unexpected 'co-habitation' will be discovered by the school authorities.

A young man tries to overcome the hostility of his girlfriend's father, a tuna fisherman, by getting the father to teach him the trade's secrets.

Based on the novel by Tetsuro Miura, this 60-minute PV (Promotional Video) stars Aya Katsuragi.

A high school science teacher is the butt of all his students' jokes, until their bus is hijacked on a school trip. But something more sinister lurks beneath the surface: he's building an atomic bomb in his apartment.

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.

A hulking man from the country pursues his beloved to the underworld of Tokyo nightclubs, where he finds work as a sideshow wrestler and becomes involved with a faded opera singer.

Akira is haunted by a "bouncing ball" song that he remembers his mother singing when he was a small child, and now on the verge of a sexually active adulthood, he wants to find the origins of the song. The young man ostensibly wanders into a time-warp in which aspects from his childhood and adulthood mix together. In this never-never land he comes across a beautiful woman/witch who is lost inside the labyrinth of her mansion, just as the young man is lost in the labyrinth of time — and on some levels, perhaps the labyrinth of his subconscious.

In the mid-1970s, a small group of friends are living in a Japanese town near an American air force base, their lives revolve around sex, drugs and rock 'n roll. The near-plotless story weaves a vividly raw, image-intensive journey through the daily monotony of drug-induced hallucinations, vicious acts of violence, overdoses, suicide, and group sex.

Naomi, who runs a boutique, is a lesbian and has been having homosexual relationships with her staff, Reiko, and a married woman, Miyako. Her friend Mari, a singer, is also a lesbian, and this is a complicated love story between two women that begins when Reiko falls in love with her one-sidedly.