Monkey Town Productions

Yuko is a Japanese girl who was taken hostage in Iraq while volunteering there as an aid worker. Finally released and back in her hometown, Yuko finds herself ostracized as a national disgrace by society that sees her helping a country other than Japan, and the embarrassment of getting captured but not killed, as things of which to be brutally ashamed.

Chokichi Kuwahata was once a leading actor, but he is ravaged by dementia and old age now. His daughter and the men in her life go against his wishes and place him in a retirement home. He slips away one day and meets another offspring from a different union.

A young-at-heart widower leads an independent life in a quiet fishing town in northern Japan. He eases his loneliness by walking in the snow and studying the growth of fish at a breeding center.

Kazuo Murata is a detective who has lost his wife and eventually the meaning of his existence.

A widower who’s daughter has been murdered at high school meets the mother of the murderer by coincidence after moving to a small town in Hokkaido.

A down-and-out scriptwriter spends his days and nights in the bars of Tokyo. When he is thrown out of a joint because it is closing time, there is always a willing lady to spend the rest of the night with. In the street he has countless semi-philosophical discussions with fellow drinkers, male and female, (shot in black-and-white, as prologue to the different chapters) but in the end it often comes down to one thing: the bottle of whisky that has to be finished. An encounter with a homeless young man with AIDS marks a turning point in the life of the writer.

Following the 2011 tsunami, three women reunite in the family home only to rekindle tense, ruinous relationships.