“This uproarious rakugo (traditional ‘sit-down’ comedy), co-written by Yuzo Kawashima, Shohei Imamura, and Keiichi Tanaka, was rated by Kinema Junpo as the fifth-greatest Japanese film of all time. Socialite Saheji (comedian Frankie Sakai) runs up a bill at a brothel and is forced to remain there until he works off his debt. However, Saheji takes advantage of the confusion leading up to the Meiji restoration (1860s), turning a profit and seducing the brothel’s staff.”—Film Society of Lincoln Center (110 mins.)

When speaking of Japanese “B” movies, one immediately thinks of Suzuki Seijun, the eccentric visionary of genre cinema. Based on a story by Japan’s most famous mystery novelist, Seicho Matsumoto, VOICE WITHOUT A SHADOW tells a crime story about a Tokyo news reporter’s quest to solve a cluster of seemingly unrelated murders; it's a classic hard-boiled set-up that deftly weds film noir toughness with a fascinating glimpse of a Japan in post-war transition. “Warped by the camera movement and editing, the space of the film combines with an underlying mood of sexual tension and perversity to foreground perception as the central problem both for the story and for the cinema.”—The Japan Foundation (92 mins.)

An inspiring, powerful hymn to the human spirit, ALONE ACROSS THE PACIFIC tells the extraordinary real life story of a young man’s dreamy, obsessive quest to break free from the strictures of society. In 1962, Kenichi Horie (Yujiro Ishihara) embarks on a heroic attempt to sail his small sloop singlehandedly across the Pacific. Leaving Osaka in “The Mermaid,” it is 94 days of savage seas, grueling psychological torment, and the ultimate loneliness of the human condition before Horie finally sets sight on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. Using Horie’s best-selling logbook as his source, Ichikawa portrays an epic struggle of man against nature with beautiful cinematography and an atmospheric score by renowned composer Toru Takemitsu. (104 mins.)

In unsentimental fashion and without judging his protagonists, Kawashima tells of the struggles and survival strategies of those on the margins of post-war Japanese society. An unwed couple takes refuge in a Tokyo red light district. Yoshigi (Mihashi Tatsuya) sells noodles while his companion Tsutue (Aratama Michiyo) finds work in a sake bar. But soon bitterness and self-pity emerge when Tsutue eyes another man of greater means. This was Kawashima’s personal favorite among his films, and its open embrace of its outsider characters was doubtless an influence on its soon-to-be famous assistant director, Shohei Imamura. (81 mins.)

Goro, a disgraced Tokyo detective, has fled the city after a hostage crisis ends in tragedy. He finds himself in a remote forest where the vegetation is diseased, the streams are polluted, and everything is dying or dead. Soon he is embroiled in a tense struggle involving a gnarled, forbidding tree. Is the solitary tree rare or a mutation? An eccentric caretaker fiercely protects the tree from a group of forest rangers who want to profit from it and a botanist who insists that the toxic tree must be destroyed. Can Goro redeem himself and “restore the rules of the world”? Masquerading as an ecological thriller, Kurosawa’s (CURE, PULSE) fascinating philosophical study is “a visually compelling, multi-layered, and insightful film on radicalism, individuality, and balance. Evoking the austere landscapes of Andrei Tarkovsky, Kurosawa similarly explores issues of conscience, spiritual longing, and personal disharmony through the manifestation of a metaphoric environmental malady.”—Strictly Film School (103 mins.)