Shigeo Mano

Movies

Two Days with Yukio Mishima
Interviewee
This documentary, produced by Hiroaki Fujii in 2005, features the crew of Yukio Mishima's 1966 film PATRIOTISM recounting their filming experience.
Tokyo Marigold
Art Direction
Eriko – lonely, aimless and self-absorbed – falls for Tamura. Despite knowing that he is waiting for his girlfriend to return from overseas, she requests to enter into a relationship with him for just one year.
The Perfect Education
Art Direction
Schoolgirl Kuniko is kidnapped by a middle-aged man Iwazono when she is jogging. He tells her that he had a failed marriage which leaves him a deep and everlasting scar in his mind. He kidnaps her in search of a perfect marriage and intends to lock her in the room and 'educate' her to perform perfect sex where body and soul are united.
Tadon and Chikuwa
Production Design
A film based on two short stories by Shiina Makoto. Tadon is the story of a cab-driver who spends his days listening to his passengers' conversations. Chikuwa is about a writer who faces a creativity bottleneck.
Tokyo Lullaby
Art Direction
Hamanaka Koichi returns to his wife Hisako and family in a sadder, run-down section of eastern Tokyo after having run away from home years before. He gives no explanation of his absence and his family asks no questions. It is only through the questions that a young writer named Asakura, who is secretly in love with Hisako, poses of local shop owners, that we learn that Hamanaka's disappearance may be related to the fact that the woman everyone thought he would marry, Tami - who runs the cafe across the street from the Hamanaka electric store - had ended up tying the knot with another man who died soon thereafter.
Tokiwa: The Manga Apartment
Art Direction
There still stands a famous apartment building where such prominent manga artists as Tezuka Osamu, Shotaro Ishinomori and Fujio Akatsuka once lived, worked, and shared experiences.
Bokyo
Production Design
In 1940, Kubota Shoten, which has been in business for generations, goes bankrupt due to the debauched lifestyle of its president, Kunimitsu Kubota. Subsequently, Kunimitsu moves back to his hometown and his children are sent to live with other relatives.
Dying at a Hospital
Production Design
Filmed in a documentary style six patients in six wards of different ages and circumstances await death at a hospital in Japan. The sterile and dismal environment is contrasted against the emotional being of the patients, their visitors and relatives and the outside world, which they will never again survey.
The Wangan Highway
Art Direction
Based on the novel of the same name by Yoshio Kataoka.
Nomugi Pass
Art Direction
The story of the silk industry and the young girls who worked as silk spinners in the early 1900s in Japan. The silk mills were located in Okaya which lies just beyond the Nomugi Pass. The women and girls worked in a hot, humid atmosphere without rest, and endured those conditions and sexual harassment to earn money for their poor families. Across the ocean, it was the great depression in America.
Double Suicide of Sonezaki
Art Direction
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.
The Corporation
Art Direction
Drama and intrigue about defense contracts and corruption.
Lullaby of the Earth
Art Direction
The story of an orphan girl, brought up in naive, rustic innocence by an elderly relative, who is suddenly exposed to the brutality, greed and deceptiveness of the outside world when her grandmother dies. Notwithstanding her healthy distrust of all strangers, which her upbringing instilled in her, it is not long before a cunning racketeer finds her weak point, that temptation which she cannot resist, that weakness, different as it may be, that each of us has, and brings her into his power. What follows is a depiction of her cruel descent into the depths of moral decay, as she becomes a collaborator in a system of exploitation, unbridled lust, vanity, and greed, in which she and other victims are always the losers.
Manhunt
Art Direction
A tough prosecutor is falsely accused of theft and goes on the run to clear his name. He is assisted by the beautiful daughter of a rich man.
Solar Eclipse
Art Direction
When bribe money from a rigged election funnels into a dam construction project, collusion, lust, greed and even murder are on the ballot.
Games
Art Direction
A 16-year-old girl works in a factory to pay her late father’s debt. When she makes up her mind to become a hostess, a boy approaches her with kind and gentle manners...(Also occasionally known in English as “Play”)
Child Bride
Art Direction
Hurry on a Sail to Dream
Art Direction
Yuki cares for a sick old man Katakura who kept her mother as his mistress. Now she is the object of his ugly desires. When she falls in love with a young man Jun her long oppressed mind leads her to commit a murder with Jun for Katakura’s enormous fortune.
Blind Beast
Art Direction
A blind sculptor kidnaps an artists’ model and imprisons her in his warehouse studio – a shadowland of perverse monuments to the female form. Here a deranged passion play of sensual and sexual obsession is acted out in world where sight is replaced by touch.
The Man Without a Map
Art Direction
A private detective is hired to find a missing man by his wife. While his search is unsuccessful, the detective's own life begins to resemble the man for whom he is searching.
Love for an Idiot
Art Direction
A middle-aged factory engineer trains, marries, and ultimately loses a teenage bride after she enslaves him to her whims.
The Great White Tower
Art Direction
The story contrasts the life of two doctors, former classmates and now both assistant professors at Naniwa University Hospital in Osaka. The brilliant and ambitious surgeon Goro Zaizen stops at nothing to rise to a position of eminence and authority, while the friendly Shuji Satomi busies himself with his patients and research.
Red Angel
Production Design
In 1939, Sakura Nishi is a young army nurse who is sent to the field hospitals in China during the Sino-Japanese war. She has to assist the surgeon Dr. Okabe with an incredible number of amputations. In the crowded wards, she gives sympathy to some of the soldiers, including sexually servicing one who has lost both arms and has no hope of returning home. She falls in love with Dr. Okabe, and follows him to the front, even though he is impotent from his morphine addiction
Patriotism
Production Design
Two characters on a Noh stage dramatize the rite of love and death of Lieutenant Shinji Takeyama and his wife Reiko.
The Freezing Point
Art Direction
Keizo Tsujiguchi believes his wife Natsue was having an extramarital affair when their child was kidnapped and killed. He believes of her extramarital affair she was unable to watch over their child properly and blames her for their daughter's death. To exact revenge on his wife, he then adopts the killer's child without telling the truth to his wife or their newly adopted child.
The Forest of No Escape
Art Direction
Adaptation of Seicho Matsumoto's novel of the same name.
Sweet Seventeen
Art Direction
Green Fruit
Art Direction
Two sisters live with their family. The elder is reserved; the younger lively. Yet, the former is first engaged and all goes well until the young man disappears
She Came For Love
Art Direction
Girls Born in August
Art Direction
Black Report
Art Direction
After a businessman is murdered, an investigation identifies a suspect who is then put on trial for that crime.
A Woman's Life
Art Direction
One of many adaptations of "Onna no isshō", this time by Yasuzo Masumura as a starring vehicle for famed actress Machiko Kyo.
Hiroshima Heartache
Art Direction
Seventeen years after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a newspaper reporter looks for the bomb's effects, but everyone seems to have forgotten. He meets a woman who was there when it happened but when they fall in love she isn't able to move on.
The Whale God
Production Design
A fishing village is terrorized by a giant whale, and the fishermen are determined to kill it.
Closing Time
Art Direction
Black Lizard
Art Direction
Celebrated detective Akechi matches wits with the infamous and devious jewel thief Black Lizard after the criminal orchestrates an elaborate kidnapping.
The Woman Who Touched Legs
Art Direction
Detective Katahachi meets a young and beautiful pickpocket and doesn’t arrest her because she was not in the act. Instead, he listens to the story about her parents who killed himself and died for overwork to feel sorry about her.
Patterns of Love
Art Direction
Omnibus picture, consisting of three stories.
The Wandering Princess
Art Direction
Pu Zhe , the younger brother of the Emperor of Manchukuo, Pu Wen, marries Ryuko the daughter of a long-established aristocratic family - all in the interest of the Japanese rulers , which legitimizes the relationship between Japan and its Chinese puppet state. To the surprise of all , a deep love between Pu Zhe and Ryuko develops. It is put to the test when Japan loses the war, Manchukuo is dissolved and the imperial court must flee. The lovers now have to separate: Pu Zhe tries to escape to Japan with his brother , while Ryuko flees with her daughter Eisei over the country. A film on the relationship between Pujie (1907-94) , brother of the " last emperor " Puyi and his second wife, Marquise Hiro Saga (1914-87).
On This Earth
Art Direction
1957 drama from director Kôzaburô Yoshimura
Night Butterflies
Art Direction
A traditional bar mistress in Kyoto clashes with her Tokyo rival.
Warning from Space
Art Direction
Large star shaped aliens travel to earth in hopes of warning them about an oncoming catastrophe. To prevent panic about their appearance, one alien takes the form of a popular singer.
五十円横町
Art Direction