An older Japanese man reflects on his past and learns more about the American culture through small encounters with strangers on a train.

The life of a young Japanese man becomes intimately intertwined with his deceased best-friend's girlfriend, as they each navigate the past in search of lost time.

A Japanese businessman reflects on his experience with Chinese people and longs to visit China.

A boy growing up during Japan’s postwar economic ascendancy comes to grips with the sudden death of his mother and the eventual passing of his blind, aging father.

Visiting Tokyo in the 1980s, a Swedish aspiring civil rights attorney from Minnesota spends her last night with a Japanese lover.

In contemporary Japan, a poor young woman finds a new approach to life in her new job: accompanying a widowed professor on trips, dressed as his dead wife.

When a young adult Tokyoite takes his younger cousin to a medical examination in his hometown, he recalls a hospital trip with his now-deceased childhood friend.

A Japanese woman who has begun to forget her name, frantically seeks the help of an eccentric clinician who eventually claims to know what happened to her name.

A Japanese primate sociologist's life falls apart in slow-motion as he struggles with research, tension in his marriage, and his declining health.

At the beginning of American occupation in Japan following World War II, an American soldier attempts to befriend a Japanese shopkeeper but finds that he can't seem to say the right thing.