Tsutomu Mizukami

The Zen Diary

Tsutomu lives alone in the mountains, writing essays, cooking Zen food with the vegetables he grows and the mushrooms he picks in the hills. His routine is happily disturbed when Machiko, his editor and love interest, occasionally visits. Tsutomu seems content with his daily life. On the other hand, he still hasn't let go of his wife's ashes, although she died 13 years ago.

White Snake Enchantment

Uta married a priest who saved her when she tried to commit suicide at a waterfall. The love triangle between a lustful priest, his second wife and his son Masao.

May Love Be Restored

A tragic love story between a prostitute and a young trainee monk.

Ballad of Orin

A blind traveling musician is abused and oppressed wherever she goes, even as the modern world imposes change around her.

Clouds at Sunset

A Japanese soldier deserts his position and travels to a small town on the Sea of Japan to start over. When a young maid falls for him, he talks her into sleeping with an older man for money.

Koto—The Lake of Tears

A touching story following young shamisen string maker, Saku. Beautiful Saku moves to Lake Yogo, known for its production of quality shamisen strings, only to find her peaceful life turned upside down when a master musician takes personal interest in her.

Nami kage

Ayako Wakao won the Blue Ribbon and the Kinema Jumpo for this film.

A Fugitive from the Past

Three robbers escape with loot from a heist before one of them kills the others. Their corpses wash up near the aftermath of a maritime calamity, provoking a policeman's interest.

A Story from Echigo

A sake factory worker on holiday returns to his home town, where he rapes the wife of one of his co-workers in the forest. The other man returns home to find his wife changed and suspects that she has been unfaithful.

A House in the Quarter

With her family suffering from extreme poverty, Yuko, as the eldest daughter, is sold to a successful brothel in Kyoto. There she is assigned to serve Takamatsu, one of the brothel’s top customers. But while Takamatsu falls madly in love with Yuko, she finds herself attracted to a young priest named Kunugida. Torn by jealousy, Takamatsu hatches an evil plan to tear them apart.

Bamboo Doll of Echizen

Based on a novel by Tsutomu Mizukami, this haunting melodrama focuses on a young bamboo worker who takes his father's prostitute as his wife.

The Temple of Wild Geese

Satoko is a mistress by trade or fate: when her master, the silkscreen artist of the Kohoan Temple in Kyoto, dies, she is given to the temple's lascivious head priest Kikuchi. She is drawn to a melancholy young acolyte, Jinen, who has observed the profligacy of his cruel master and Satoko's utter dependence on the man. Jinen is both fascinated and disturbed by Satoko's interest in him; he is similarly caught between loathing of Kikuchi and of the dark circumstances of his birth and his own moral weakness. The story unfolds in a dreamlike manner—a flashback inspired by a now-infamous image on a silkscreen in the souvenir shop at the so-called Temple of the Wild Geese.

Mist and Shadows

The film adaptation of the bestseller of the same name by Tsutomu Mizukami. A large-scale detective drama in which two newspaper reporters investigate the mysterious death of a teacher in Hokuriku and the dark suspicions that lurk behind it.