The best Yoshiyoshi Arakawa’s romance movies

Tsuneo is a university student working part-time in a mah-jong parlour. Lately the customers have been talking about an old lady who pushes a baby carriage through the streets. They say she is carrying something for a crime syndicate, and they wonder what it is she has in the carriage… Money? Drugs? One day, the owner of the mah-jong parlour sends Tsuneo out to walk his dog. A baby carriage comes rolling down a hill and crashes into a guard rail. The old lady asks him to look into the carriage, where he finds a young woman clutching a knife. This is how Tsuneo first meets the girl who calls herself Josee.

A man continually trying and failing to get his wife to stay dead; a self-absorbed ad agency creative director who comes up with one unworkably inane idea after another; a British hitman who only wants to know everyone's function in life; and an unfortunate office worker and father whose brain is left scrambled after a stage hypnotist is murdered in mid-performance.

Unemployed 35 year old Sakurai aspired to become an actor, but failed miserably. He decides to end his own life, but first he goes to purify himself at a public bathhouse. While there, he meets the very prosperous Kondo, who subsequently suffers a fall, erasing his memory. On a whim, Sakurai switches locker keys, steals the man's belongings, and decides to pass himself off as Kondo. What Sakurai does not know is that Kondo runs an illegal business, which brings him into contact with ornery Yakuza members. Meanwhile, Kondo has been convinced that he is actually the failed actor Sakurai and he faces the dismal reality of that life with increasing bewilderment. Fortunately, at the hospital he meets the lovely Kanae who, while yearning for marriage, goes out of her way to help "Sakurai" pull himself together. Eventually Kondo regains his memory, but before he can make a new life with Kanae, he has to solve the many problems caused by the theft of his identity.

In June 1945 Yamauchi Fusako goes alone to Manchuria where her husband, Setsuo, a second lieutenant of the Kwantung Army, is based. At that time, 200,000 Japanese had settled in Manchuria, a Japanese occupied territory, as settler communities. Fujita Hideo’s family worked hard to clear the wilderness, but the Soviets are lying in wait for an invasion of Manchuria from the North. Fusako is safely reunited with her husband at the headquarters of the Kwantung Army’s Fifth Training Squadron in Manchuria’s Dahushan. Setsuo also takes good care of his beloved wife, but his position is an instructor to the young soldiers who will eventually carry out suicide attacks. He wonders if he should have summoned her and speaks of these mixed feelings to his commanding officer, Michiba Kazuo, a first lieutenant. Michiba is concerned about Setsuo’s attempts to cherish his wife before the coming showdown on homeland. Fusako learns about life in Manchuria from Michiba’s wife, Etsu.