Best movies like A Wanderer's Notebook

A woman marries, gives birth to a stillborn child, and divorces, falls in love with a hotel-keeper, only to find herself subordinated to his drive for success, takes up with a tailor who cannot console himself with her strong personality.

Utamaro, a great artist, lives to create portraits of beautiful women, and the brothels of Tokyo provide his models. A world of passion swirls around him, as the women in his life vie for lovers. And, occasionally, his art gets him into trouble.

Keiko, whom everyone calls Mama, narrates her story: she's a hostess on the Ginza, 30, a widow. She describes life's vicious cycle: acting cheerful around drunks, dressing and living well to convey confidence, needing money for these expenses and for her demanding mother and brother, and knowing she's growing older. She's of an age when she must choose: to seek marriage (difficult given her tarnished occupation), to be a kept woman, or to borrow money to buy a bar of her own. Each route has dangers, including investors demanding a return on their loans. Keiko has a quiet dignity that attracts men, but are they what they seem? Does she actually have choices?

Ten years into a marriage, the wife is disappointed by the husband's lack of financial success, meaning she has to work and can't treat herself and the husband finds the wife slovenly and mean-spirited: she neither cooks not cleans particularly well and is generally disagreeable. In turn, he alternately ignores her and treats her as a servant. Neither is particularly happy, not helped by their unsatisfactory lodgers. The husband is easily seduced by an ex-colleague, a widow with a small child who needs some security, and considers leaving his wife.

Kiyoko (Takamine Hideko) and her husband want to open a coffee shop. She becomes increasingly close to the bank clerk (Mifune Toshiro) she's asked for a loan.

In 39 interviews with actors and actresses, writers, producers and staff members, interspersed with film excerpts and stills, Shindō recounts the life and career of his friend and mentor Mizoguchi.

Based on the life of pioneering manga artist Shinichi Abe, "Miyoko asagaya kibun" starts from the 1970's in Asagaya District of Tokyo where Shinichi Abe began his career with then model girlfriend Miyoko.

A married Japanese forester during WWII is sent to Indochina to manage forests. He meets a young Japanese typist and promises to leave his wife. He doesn't and after the war, she turns up and the affair resumes.

In A Tale of Archery, young, timid bowmaster Kazuma (Akitake Kôno) seeks to beat the archery record set by Hoshino Kanzaemon, a mysterious figure who, it is rumored, drove the previous champion (Kazuma’s father) to suicide. Possessed of much raw talent, Kazuma is also very much a coward, holing himself up in an inn run by the kindly Okinu (Kinuyo Tanaka) and generally avoiding confrontation of any sort. Despite his clandestine manner, enough of the locals know of Kazuma’s purpose and an attempt is made on his life. He is saved by Karatsu Kanbei (Kazuo Hasegawa), a samurai who offers to help Kazuma hone his archery skills, though it soon becomes clear that this apparently selfless stranger has several potentially shady ulterior motives.

In Edo Period Japan, a noblewoman's banishment for her love affair with a lowly page signals the beginning of her inexorable fall.

A sad and troubled man finds a new job five years after the end of WWII, where he writes love letters for other people.

After her mother runs away from home, Tomoko is raised to be a geisha. One day Tomoko meets her mother in a red-light district in Tokyo and her life deeply gets in trouble.

After the Japanese defeat to the Russians, Kaji leads the last remaining men through Manchuria. Intent on returning to his dear wife and his old life, Kaji faces great odds in a variety of different harrowing circumstances as he and his fellow men sneak behind enemy lines.

Mr. Omura, a teacher, leads a group of male students in an outdoor drill. One slight, comic young man, Shinji Okajima, has no shirt under his jacket; he scratches at fleas and makes faces behind Omura's back. Jump ahead several years, Shinji is married with three children. He sells insurance, and on the company's annual bonus day, he protests when an older worker is fired. Shinji loses his own job as a result, and he and his wife must find ways to cope. Lassitude, pride, the demands and needs of young children, and relationships from bygone school days all play a part in the outcome of their struggle.

Schoolteacher Hisako Oishi struggles to imbue her students with a positive view of the world despite the fact that war is looming.

When an only child is struck by a car and dies, the child's mother seeks vengeance against the driver in this thrilling drama. The car was driven by the wife of a company president who is having an affair. The woman's husband manages to buy silence about the incident, but the victim's mother discovers the identity of the driver. After she secures a job in the home of the company president and his philandering spouse, the woman plans to murder the couple's son when he reaches the age of her late son.

When Koichi Takahasi (Miutani) is transferred from Tokyo to a small village in Iwate Prefecture, they set up hoe in a two-hundred year-old farmhouse. The family is split between those who hate the move and those who are happy. Fumiko (Yasuda), the wife, is unhappy at the change and doesn’t get on with her elderly neighbours, Azumi (Hashimoto) is sad about having to transfer to a new school. Koichi’s mother, Sumiyo (Kusabue), rather likes the new community while young Tomoya Takahashi (Hamada) really enjoys the new move because he can play outdoors. Koichi takes note of the split in the family but finds himself struggling at his new job. Thankfully the house has Zashiki Warashi (yokai) living there who will unite them with their antics. Judging by the poster these antics won’t be terrifying.

In the sixth and final episode Rentaro Mikuni steals the show as Baiken Shishido, Musashi's nemesis. Mikuni is the nominal villain of the film, but he is a devoted husband and father as well. He tries to kill Musashi only to avenge the death of his brother-in-law. While Baiken (who wields a chain and sickle against Musashi's sword) is a very human character and the emotions that Mikuni displays in his performance are quite believable and engaging

The plans of a trio of burglars are continually thwarted by the arrival of visitors to the house they plan to rob.

Young widow Ine is suffering under the harsh treatment of her mother in law. As a former Geisha, Ine had struggled to be accepted into the well-established Rokujo family from the beginning. With the support of Jiro, a young man Ine's late husband had saved from homelessness as a young boy, Ine tries to keep the family's heritage of silk processing alive. Their close relationship soon causes gossip among the villagers and threaten Ine's position in the family even further ...

Fumiko, mother of two children and wife of an unfaithful man, shares her family life with her budding vocation as a poet. The beginning of her successful literary career coincides with her divorce and her breast cancer diagnosis. In the last stage of her life, she meets a young journalist from Tokyo who wants to write a story on her life.

Gosho’s most celebrated film both in Japan and the West, Where Chimneys Are Seen is perhaps the most compelling example of his concern for, and insights into, the everyday lives of lower-middle-class people. Based on Rinzo Shiina’s novel of the absurd, the film depicts the lives of two couples against the backdrop of Tokyo’s growing industrialization during the 1950s.

Okoma, a witty young woman working as a conductor in an old, rickety bus in Kōfu, Yamanashi (rural Japan), has a creative idea that could avert the dwindling number of passengers when her job and the bus company itself are at stake.

Prodded by a friend request, a feckless forty-something recalls his past relationships from the 90s onward, looking for his vanished hopes and dreams.

Setsuko is unhappily married to Mimura, an engineer with no job and a bad drinking habit. She had always been in love with Hiroshi but both of them failed to propose when Hiroshi left for France a few years ago. Now he is back and Mariko (Setsuko's sister) tries to reunite them. She too is secretly in love with Hiroshi.

Otsuta is running the geisha house Tsuta in Tokyo. Her business is heavily in debt. Her daughter Katsuyo doesn't see any future in her mother's trade in the late days of Geisha. But Otsuta will not give up. This film portraits the day time life of geisha when not entertaining customers.

Sanae is left a widow after her prestigious husband dies, but holds the proceeds of a million yen insurance policy. Being childless, her former in-laws have no objection to her return to her own family.

A luckless geisha struggles to make a living for herself and her young son.

In the late 1950's prostitution was banned in Japan and if a woman was found exercising this profession they were sent to a reformatory. This is a story of one of these brave women Kuniko who is released from the reformatory and tries to build a new life.

The story of Kiyoko, a young woman who has successfully managed to make a break with her dysfunctional family who have been trying to arrange a marriage for her with a disagreeable man whom she has rejected.

An actress returns to Tokyo after a successful stint in Hollywood to reclaim—with the help of her gangster brother—the daughter she abandoned years before.

Adaptation of Kishida Kunio's novel. Set against the backdrop of a power struggle within a hospital, depicts the love lives of the director's daughter, the administrative director, a doctor, and a nurse.

On the day of college graduation, Mieko (Sayuri Yoshinaga) stood on stage as the valedictorian for the Department of English. During her university years she made sure that she would always come out on top, and she did. With a victorious graduation behind her, she plans out the next chapter of her life: become a successful novelist and go out with a classmate she's been secretly eyeing for the past couple of years.

Five women classmates from a college in Tokyo are on the first stretch of a walking tour when one of them, Masako, falls ill at a railway station. Osen, a middle-aged maid from a nearby inn, takes her in and nurses her, assisted by Dr. Minami, a young physician who diagnoses her illness as a mild case of pneumonia. With Masako in good hands and needing a few days to recuperate, her classmates continue their tour. Masako’s recovery, however, is hampered by her spoiled and immature nature and her determination to punish the world for the loss of her mother.

Buntaro, the president of a food trading company got tired of the day-to-day routine of life. The new secretary, Nobuko, suggested her "shacho-san" (the president) run away from the job. Nobuko took Buntaro to her home and introduced him to her own family as friend, "Sachio-san"...