The best Yoji Tanaka’s romance movies

The secret warriors of feudal Japan were the Ninja. Sent on impossible missions, the Ninja were trained to work in shadows, gather information and defeat the enemy to build a world of peace. Red Shadow, Blue Shadow and Aska are neophyte ninjas under the tutelage of White Shadow. Their life is a series of perilous missions that entail intrigue, deception and intimidation.

Prosecutor Kohei Kuryu takes charge of a case with a foreign embassy possessing the key to solve the case. Due to the extraterritoriality involving the case, the investigation has not gone anywhere. A crisis then ensues. Kohei Kuryu and his office attempt to extract the truth behind the wall of the embassy.

Yukihiko Nishino is very popular with women, but, in the end, he is always dumped by a woman. Yukihiko seeks out his true love.

The film is a series of vignettes from Taiji Tonoyama's life and film clips, interspersed with a dialogue to camera by Nobuko Otowa, addressing the camera as if she is addressing Tonoyama himself, recollecting events in his life. The film focuses on Tonoyama's alcohol dependence and his various sexual relationships, as well as his film work with Shindo.

Sawaki is a postman who's not quite thrilled about his boring way of life. But his life is about to change when he delivers mail to his old schoolmate Noguchi, who's now a member of the Yakuza, the Japanese Mafia, and just finished cutting his little finger off...

Koizumi Risa an unusually tall high school girl, meets the "vertically challenged" young man Otani Atsushi. They find common ground in height anxieties and interests. Risa (Ema Fujisawa), a tall Japanese girl, gets rejected by a boy because she is taller than him. Otani (Teppei Koike), a short Japanese guy, gets rejected by a girl because he is shorter than her. Obviously these two would make the oddest of couples and would never be a good match for each other right? Well love doesn’t always follow such logic as Love Complex shows.

A young samurai stuck at the bottom of the hierarchical order attempts to rescue his childhood sweetheart from an evil clan lord after learning of a plot to kill her and her infant child. Bunshiro Maki is a skilled swordfighter who's lethal with a blade, yet still can't rise through the ranks of the system. After his father is accused of plotting against his clan and forced to commit ritual suicide, his longtime love Fuku is sent to Edo to become the clan lord's concubine. A few years later, Fuku has bore the clan lord a son. When Maki learns that the clan has hatched a plan to kill Fuku and her son to secure succession to the throne, he recruits two childhood friends to help thwart the diabolical plot.

Hiroko is about to get married to the handsome Kenichiro when disaster strikes. Her landlord stops by the happy bride-to-be’s apartment where a pair of wayward scissors falls from a shelf and stabs him in the back as he bends forward to pick something up. His body begins to stiffen even before Hiroko realizes what has happened. On the road to Mount Fuji where Hiroko intends to dump the corpse, something falls on the hood of her car out of the blue. That “something” is Fukuko Kobayashi (Yoshino Kimura), who is dying to… die. Fukuko believes that she is irredeemably unhappy and has endeavored to commit suicide again and again. As Hiroko and Fukuko begin their journey to abandon the corpse, a weird friendship begins to build.

A gas leak explosion at a yakuza hideout provides a shy nurse and a rental car clerk with the opportunity to take a briefcase full of money. A cross-country chase ensues.

Naomi Shimizu is a young career woman working for Enrico Dandolo, an Italian fashion house. That is until one day the company declares bankruptcy. Accustomed to living in luxury she tries to make a run for it with the last remaining company asset, a red Alpha Romeo sports car. Unfortunately she recklessly collides with an bicycle messenger. Lacking any funds to pay for a settlement, she end up having to work as a bicycle messenger.

A failed director is trying to get his next movie off the ground, while dealing with his cranky brother and his estranged wife.

This coming-of-age story from Japan opens just after 17-year-old Sataka has gotten dumped by her boyfriend. When her mother is hospitalized with a malignant stomach ulcer, Sataka is left alone with her emotionally repressed father; whiling away the hours one day, she comes across a love letter written to her mother 24 years earlier. Deciding to track down the letter's author, Sataka eventually finds Shinichiro (Hiroyuki Sanada), an overweight slob who was abandoned by his wife years earlier and now spends his time hanging around pachinko parlors. Determined to clean him up and reintroduce him to her mother, Sataka nags Shinchiro until he finally agrees to her demands, and a gradual friendship develops between the two as Sataka drags him to the gym and a clothing store. But once Shinchiro's makeover is complete, he turns the tables on his young friend, and when the time comes for him to meet Sataka's mother, all concerned parties find themselves embarking on a new phase in their lives.