Best movies like Epitaph to My Love

When the man who seduced the famous painter Otoko as a teenager--and then wrote a bestselling novel about it--reappears in her life, her pupil--and lesbian lover--hatches a plot to destroy the man and his family.

Assassination begins with the events of 1853 when "four black ships" anchored at Edo Bay, sparking civil unrest and the major political manoeuvring that saw the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate. At a time when assassination had become a disturbing political tool, Shinoda's film follows Hachiro Kiyokawa, an ambitious, masterless samurai whose allegiances drift dangerously between the Shogunate and the Emperor.

Two brothers compete for the amorous favors of a young woman during a seaside summer of gambling, boating, and drinking.

Successful and married with children, paper-mill owner Jihei knows better than to contradict the strict social and moral codes of 18th-century Japan. But when he meets the lovely courtesan Koharu, he becomes a man obsessed. Koharu returns his love, even foregoing other customers while Jihei schemes to somehow buy her freedom. His efforts yield ruinous consequences for his business and his family life, and Koharu is meanwhile purchased by another client.

In late 60s Tokyo, Eddie, a young drag queen, is the favourite of Gonda, the owner of the bar where she works. This relationship provokes the jealousy of Gonda's mistress, Leda, the bar's matron. Eddie and Gonda decide to get rid of her...

Conditions have been better for the nameless protagonist: his grandmother is a shoplifter and his war criminal father and sister have an unhealthy, intimate relationship with the family rabbit.

This faux-documentary follows a butoh master, a fashion designer, and a filmmaker racing against time to create art and help a young girl in love.

A director faces creative block while working on his latest film - a reimagination of his adolescence growing up in a mountain village in rural Japan.

In this drama at the end of World War II, the inhabitants of a small Japanese fishing village must come to terms with their nation's defeat and the sudden occupation of General MacArthur and his troops.

Follows a young med student's relationships with two women: a dangerous affair with a childhood friend and his mother's struggle to rebuild their estranged relationship.

Years of warfare end in a Japan unified under the Tokugawa shogunate, and samurai spy Sasuke Sarutobi, tired of conflict, longs for peace. When a high-ranking spy named Tatewaki Koriyama defects from the shogun to a rival clan, however, the world of swordsmen is thrown into turmoil. After Sasuke is unwittingly drawn into the conflict, he tracks Tatewaki, while a mysterious, white-hooded figure seems to hunt them both. By tale’s end, no one is who they seemed to be, and the truth is far more personal than anyone suspected. Director Masahiro Shinoda’s Samurai Spy, filled with clan intrigue, ninja spies, and multiple double crosses, marks a bold stylistic departure from swordplay film convention.

An outlaw pushes the residents of Edo's red light district to rebel against a growing number of stifling, moralistic laws.

Yutaka was fourteen years old when he was run over by a car and fell into a coma. Now, ten years later, he wakes up and realizes that his family is not intact anymore: father, mother and sister live at different places. Yutaka decides to re-open the pony farm that his family once ran.

Outside of a small village in Japan, a mysterious pond is inhabited by mythic creatures. Their story is of revenge, tragedy, and the power of real love. A classical tale which translates wonderfully to film.

Struggling with his true emotions, dreams, memories of the past and the reality Shizuo is about to marry, but is torn between his wife-to-be and the love to his mother.

College student Asako falls in love at first sight with Baku after meeting at a photography exhibit. Romance sparks between the two but doesn't last long when Baku suddenly disappears from her life. Two years later, she spots a man that bears a striking resemblance to him. Even though it is only his physical similarities to Baku that attracted her to him, she doesn't say so and starts dating the soft-spoken young man called Ryohei.

As the great military commander Nobunaga Oda was consolidating his power across Japan, one of his actions was to wipe out a clan of assassins, killing every man, woman and child he found in the village. Years later, one of the survivors has hired a young but skilled assassin to avenge the deaths of his friends and family. His mission: to sneak into the most heavily guarded castle in Japan, and kill the supreme ruler of the country.

Near the end of the 20th century on Tokyo's Chuo train line, just before Hong Kong's return to Chinese control, masses of people go on a rampage, and love runs wild.

A vengeful contractor hires a series of young killers to target a woman muckraker. Trouble brews when an amateur marksman shows up his eclectic competition.

Takashi Fujiki stars as a rebel in this drama about life on the Yokohama waterfront by New Wave director Masahiro Shinoda. The rebel works as an errand boy for a shipping company and vents his frustrations by plucking on the guitar. His interpretations of popular trends in music are sometimes right-on, and sometimes not exactly. Bereft of his guitar, the rebel's modes of expression are not as effective in generating interest as the Yokohama docks themselves, a fascinating world in their own right.

Two interwoven stories. The first is a biography of anarchist Sakae Osugi which follows his relationship with three women in the 1920s. The second centers on two 1960s students researching Osugi's theories.

Daisuke Yuge works as a tour guide in Oahu, Hawaii and also studies astronomy. He meets Rui Fujishima at a cafe and falls in love with her at first sight, but Rui Fujishima suffers from memory loss due to a past accident.

Rena and Yuko are at it again.

Shuji Mimura works as a broadcast writer. He learns that he doesn't have much time left to live. He decides to concentrate on the future of his beloved family. Shuji Mimura's final plan is to find the best man to marry his wife Ayako.

A mountain man beheads his many wives to prove his love to an alluring woman he meets in an enchanted forest.

The myth of the Sun Goddess who founded Japanese society is seen through the lens of a modern view of history.

In a Japanese colony, children overthrow their parental guardians and attempt to form a new society. Their plan spirals out of control and they are soon lost in a web of sexual deviation and violence.

Mishima has just committed suicide. Two couples meet by accident at an inn in the countryside, the man and the woman, now, each with a new partner, who knew each other already for ten years...

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.

A spontaneous romance blooms between Kawamura, a professor touring Europe, and Naoko, a married woman living in Paris, scarred by the Nagasaki atomic bombings. The two protagonists travel around Europe trying to find themselves.

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.

When two sisters fall in love with the same man, one must decide to look elsewhere.

Romantic comedy about a woman struggling with work and romance as she tries to figure out how to really live and love. Directed by Kataoka Shuji of the "Shin janki" and "Yakuza no daimon" series. Shimamura Misaki (Seto Saki), who works for a company in the restaurant industry, is a go-getter spinning her wheels and making little headway in either romance or work. An older colleague asks her to organize a wedding, and then she gets asked to serve as an interim manager at an udon shop operated by her company. Her troubles pile on, and then the restaurant manager Iwabuchi Tatsuya (Shibata Akiyoshi) does a certain something to the exhausted Misaki.

Dvorak's Symphony No. 9, "From the New World" wafts through a hospice recreation room. Sitting at the grand piano is a young girl, Chiori, with a prodigious ability to play any piece of music after one hearing. Keisuke Kisaragi whose career was abruptly cut short when he jumped in front of a bullet fired by a crazed gunman. The nerves in one hand were severed but he saved the life of Chiori. The tragic incident takes the lives of Chiori's parents, however, and Keisuke becomes her guardian. Not long after their return to Japan, Keisuke discovers Chiori's musical gift.

Seeking revenge against the guard who tormented him, a young man returns to the island where he was imprisoned in reform school. But his plans for vengeance are disturbed when he encounters a strange and beautiful young woman