Kei Hamano

The year is 1932, and a woman, whose tenant-farmer fiancé is fighting in China, is raped by the landowner's son, who has returned from the war with a crippling injury, and then forced into marriage with him. In four more chapters, presented over three decades, their children undertake their own searches for love, while the parents try to make each other as miserable as possible.

In a time of continuous civil wars ravaging the fields of feudal Japan, the eldest son of a very poor peasant family, living alongside the bridge over the Fuefuki river, decides to serve a warlord to escape his miserable condition, being soon followed by his younger brothers. Although not all the men of the family take this tragic path of death, women of the family will be doomed to endure the pain of loss during the next five generations.

The backstage romances of an egotistical singer and his under-valued manager, a lovelorn bandman and a nude dancer.

When a wealthy, selfish family decides to take care of an elderly hobo who collapsed near their home, they are beset by visits from his numerous friends.

A father curries favor with his bosses to further his career, but his wife has lost faith in him. She returns to her family home while they rent out their house during the summer to pay off their mortgage, and there she meets a lonely old man...

After surviving the double suicide pact she made with her lover, a woman gives birth to their child.

Two men at an ironworks encounter roadblocks: the first does not have the grades to get a job, while the other finds himself falling for a co-worker.

The plans of a trio of burglars are continually thwarted by the arrival of visitors to the house they plan to rob.

Ignoring the protests of his working-class mother, a young man becomes wrapped up in the world of delinquents and yakuza.