Best movies like Little Forest: Winter/Spring

The summer of his high school freshman year, Hodaka runs away from his remote island home to Tokyo, and quickly finds himself pushed to his financial and personal limits. The weather is unusually gloomy and rainy every day, as if taking its cue from his life. After many days of solitude, he finally finds work as a freelance writer for a mysterious occult magazine. Then, one day, Hodaka meets Hina on a busy street corner. This bright and strong-willed girl possesses a strange and wonderful ability: the power to stop the rain and clear the sky.

Maki Eda works for an advertising agency at a large company. She is a single and doesn't have good luck with men. She also isn't very good at cooking and likes eating junk food. One day, she meets Nagisa Katayama. He is an art teacher and a vegetarian. Unlike Maki, Nagisa cooks very well. The two people then happen to live together. Maki realizes that she is in love with Nagisa, but Nagisa is gay. Through his cooking, they solve their own problems and become important to each other.

A story that revolves around three sisters who live in their grandmother's home and the arrival of their 13-year-old half sister.

Masato is a young ramen chef in Japan. When he finds his late mother's journal after the sudden death of his emotionally distant father, he takes it with him to her native country, Singapore, hoping to piece together the story of his family and his life.

On a quiet street in Helsinki, Sachie has opened a diner featuring rice balls. For a month she has no customers. Then, in short order, she has her first customer, meets Midori, a gangly Japanese tourist, and invites her to stay with her, and meets Masako, a formal and ethereal middle-aged woman whose luggage has gone missing. The three women work in the diner, interact, and serve customers. A somewhat brusque man teaches Sachie to make delicious coffee, then he returns under other circumstances. Three neighborhood women inspect the empty diner every day; will anything bring them inside? We learn why Sachie serves rice balls; but why Finland?

A story about the disappearance of Kirishima, a star athlete of the volleyball club, and how his disappearance affects every person in school.

Based on a popular manga, the film is a tender coming-of-age love story set deep in Japan's countryside. When eighth grade cool guy Hiromi transfers from Tokyo to a small elementary/middle school with only six kids enrolled, wholesome and honest Soyo becomes enthralled with his sophisticated world.

The family of an older man who runs a small sake brewery become concerned with his finances and his health after they discover him visiting an old mistress from his youth.

Cheng, 45, a restaurant owner from China, has travelled with his young son halfway around the world to a remote village in Finland. His wife died recently in an accident, and Cheng wanted to have a break from everything by traveling with his son to see an old Finnish friend who lives on a farm in the countryside of Finland. It’s the most remote place Cheng can imagine with endless forests, thousands of lakes, a country with entire population of one-fifth of Cheng’s home town, Shanghai.

A young farmer in rural Yorkshire numbs his daily frustrations with binge drinking and casual sex, until the arrival of a Romanian migrant worker.

Meiko Inoue is a recent college grad working as an office lady in a job she hates. Her boyfriend Taneda is permanently crashing at her apartment because his job as a freelance illustrator doesn't pay enough for rent. And her parents in the country keep sending her boxes of veggies that just rot in her fridge. Straddling the line between her years as a student and the rest of her life, Meiko struggles with the feeling that she's just not cut out to be a part of the real world.

A strict, but caring mother has an awakening when she is told she has cancer and it is terminal. She has a few months. She needs to complete her tasks in that short time frame.

Sayaka works at a office. She's not very good at her job or with love. One night, she finds a man, Itsuki, collapsed in front of her home. She takes him inside and they begin to live together. Itsuki teaches Sayaka about cooking wild herbs and collecting wild herbs, but he has a secret.

Twelve years after their beloved eldest son, Junpei, drowned while saving a stranger's life, Kyohei and Toshiko welcome their surviving children home for a family reunion. Younger son Ryota still feels that his parents resent that he isn't the one who died; his new wife, Yukari, is awkwardly meeting the rest of the family for the first time. Daughter Chinami strains to fill the uncomfortable pauses with forced cheer.

The master of a dorayaki pastry store hires a 76-year-old woman whose talents attract customers from all over. But she's hiding a troubling secret. Life's joys are found in the little details, and no matter what may be weighing you down, everyone loves a good pastry.

A tale of delinquent and lazy school girls. In their efforts to cut remedial summer math class, they end up poisoning and replacing the school's brass band.

Matt Ballot has returned home after 12 years of hard-drinking in all 48 states. His wife has managed to raise their 14-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son nicely without his help. Matt is considered a disgrace to the town he came from and now he finds himself trying to win the love of his children, his wife, and the respect of the townspeople. Set in Arkansas in the 1920s.

A university student attends a Japanese tea ceremony near her house with her cousin. There she has the Japanese tea ceremony in her life and it's there for her during moments when she is sad or happy.

A man has thrown away love and a woman has given up on love. The two souls meet in a brief summer in the northern city of Hakodate.

A disgruntled researcher injects his former employers' meal with a serum that turns their sushi into flesh-eating monsters.

A 21-year-old girl is released from prison, only to deal with the neighborhood gossip about her and family conflicts. She decides to save one million yen, move to where no one knows her and keep repeating the process.

Abandoned in the barren wasteland of Kyoto, a savage, enraged orphan does whatever it takes to survive in the wild. When he crosses paths with civilization, he must learn to tame the beast within.

Nana is 19 and lives in a corner of Tokyo. Her birth mother and Marin, a girl the same age who she loves, were the only people she could trust. Nana confronts them in her yearning for love, but the world does not give it to her. With her whole life ahead of her, Nana struggles, suffers, and begins a search for the true meaning of love.

An American woman is stranded in Tokyo after breaking up with her boyfriend. Searching for direction in life, she trains to be a râmen chef under a tyrannical Japanese master.

Rio is a high school student in Tokyo. Her mother tells her she will spend the summer in the countryside. There, she meets Ginzo. He is a high school student and handsome. They fall in love.

Nikuko is a brash, jolly, scattered, and passionate woman in an otherwise sleepy seaside town in northern Japan. She’s also the single mother of 11-year-old Kikuko, who is her opposite in many ways. Kikuko is a string-bean of a young girl, pensive, quietly curious, and methodical in how she approaches life in this small harbor town. Nikuko embarrasses Kikuko as any mom of a preteen would, but Nikuko’s bold spirit makes her especially well-known in a town where Kikuko herself wants nothing more than to simply blend in. As Kikuko navigates the everyday social dramas of middle school, enhanced with touches of magical realism from her ever-present imagination, a shocking revelation from the past threatens to uproot the pair’s tender relationship.

A restaurant opens at midnight. Both the menu offerings and personality of the owner draw a series of flawed patrons including Tamako, whose boyfriend has passed away, live-in worker Michiru, and ruckus-raising Kenzo.

A couple decide to relocate from Tokyo to the northern island of Hokkaido where they settle and establish a bakery and café called Mani. One cooks. The other bakes. Everyone walks out happy.

Two young women must come to terms with the fact that a man they're deeply linked to is a murdering rapist.

Fleeing heartbreak in the big city, Ichiko returns to Komori, her rural hometown. She battles summer's rain and humidity, bakes her own bread, grows hothouse tomatoes and tills the fields. During autumn, the time for pickling and preserving fish and sweet potatoes, Ichiko begins reaping rice and recalls her departure five years before.

Jess, age 18, and Moss, age 12 are second cousins in the dark-fire tobacco fields of rural Western Kentucky. Without immediate families that they can relate to, and lacking friends their own age, they only have each other. Over the course of a summer they venture on a journey exploring deep secrets and hopes of a future while being confronted with fears of isolation, abandonment and an unknown tomorrow.

The Master’s late-night diner welcomes a woman troubled by funeral fans, an elderly scam victim, and a noodle delivery man struggling with love.

Two different students—a successful but aloof academic and a rebellious but kindhearted delinquent—form a friendship through their love of jazz music.

Majime, an eccentric man in publishing company, who has unique ability of words, joins the team that will compile a new dictionary, ‘The Great Passage.’ In the eclectic team, he becomes immersed in the world of dictionaries. But the team is overwhelmed with problems. Will ‘The Great Passage’ ever be completed?

A schoolboy has a crush on his pretty class-mate Keiko on the inland island of Awaji. He figures her routine of taking baths at the public one is a good way to get to know her, but he first has to overcome his sensitivity to hot water, the presence of other school-mates and of course his shyness. He has never mustered the courage to speak to her in class after all.