5 Movies Starring Mikako Ichikawa

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Quiet and introspective Kayako routinely has lunch on a rooftop with three of her friends that attend an all girls high school with her in a seaside town. One day she invites Masami Endo to join the group. As her friendship with Masami grows, she loses contact more and more with the others. She is impressed with Endo's greater knowledge of music and art, and although Endo proclaims that she is insignificant with no aim in life, Kayako says that she wishes that she could be like her new friend. Their feelings deepen beyond friendship and she proclaims her love for Endo on a lonely beach. The two become physically intimate but when summer comes Masami disappears and Kayako learns that she has gone to Tokyo to meet a married man with whom she had an affair the year before. An abortion had led to her being suspended from school. Feeling betrayed when Masami returns and lies about where she has been, Kayako keeps to herself and starts painting a still life, emulating Cezanne paintings in one of Masami's books. Although they reconcile and Kayako speaks of them going way to study together, her love of painting leads to her leaving for Tokyo alone to study art, while Masami remains behind. Masami sends a videotape showing a shot of the beach, and then the blue sea, proclaiming that unlike Kayako, this is all that she can do in an artistic sense.

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Shou's father Norio finds his son in a rather meaningless existence in Tokyo dominated by alcohol and porn videos. Having left home two years earlier to pursue life as a musician, Shou has left his band and his girlfriend has left him. His father asks a favor, that Shou clean out the apartment of his aunt Matsuko, who he says led a meaningless life until her murder at the age of 53. The apartment is filled with garbage bags and is even more unkempt than his apartment has become, and he becomes intrigued with his aunt as details of her life are supplied by a tattooed neighbor and others. Her feelings of neglect by her father Tsunehiro, who favored her chronically ill younger sister, Kumi, translated into becoming a dutiful junior high school teacher devoted to her students until being forced to resign after being blamed for the theft of some money by one of them. Leaving her family due to the disgrace, she had a series of affairs with lovers who physically abused her and did a stint as a massage parlor girl due to her beauty. After her pimp lover dumped her and gave her share of earnings to his new lover, they argued and after killing him she left by train and contemplated suicide. Dissuaded by a lonely barber, she happily set out to build a quiet life with him until the police came to charge her with murder. Upon her release from prison she silently slipped away after finding that the barber had started a new family. Becoming a "Yakusa Girl" she rationalized that it was better to be on the run with a mobster than be alone. However, her mobster lover rejected her after being released from a term in prison and she became an eccentric recluse. Shou concludes that his aunt fulfilled his ex-girlfriend's parting comment about it being better to give to others rather than expecting to receive.

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Taeko an stressed out career woman leaves her stressed out life in the city for an island vacation. The vacation does not become what expected, as everyone on the island are rather strange.

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A single woman runs a rent-a-cat service to provide companions for lonely people.