About 1786 the doings of a demented lord results in many masterless samurai, including Iyemon (Kei Sato) who is used to luxury and cannot adjust to the hand-to-mouth conditions & piecework of umbrella making.
Follows the murder of a money-lending masseur by an impoverished samurai. The slain masseur's daughter will also fall victim to his curse, so that she can become empowered as an agent of her father's vengeance.
Mitsue is a popular stage actress and the lover of a shamisen player named Seijuro. She jealously murders two other objects of his affection: Okiyo, a young woman from a samurai family, and Kuro, a cat.
During a fever, Tateo, the male protagonist believes he is dying and has the hallucination that his beautiful wife, Reiko (Tamaki Katori), the daughter of a wealthy family, is having an affair w/ another man.
Nishina Saburouta is powerful but corrupted priest. One night, an old samurai who couldn't bear him any more, attempts to kill him, but without success.
The defense and the prosecution have rested and the jury is filing into the jury room to decide if a young Spanish-American is guilty or innocent of murdering his father.
In 1927, Charles Lindbergh struggles to finance and design an airplane that will make his New York to Paris flight the first solo transatlantic crossing.
The corner Schönhauser Allee in East Berlin is the main meeting-point for a group of adolescents. Dieter is a construction worker who falls in love with Angela.