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.
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.
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.
Young forester Sixt is wounded one night. Smuggling in the mountains is the reason. By day, the brothers Benno and Simon Schaidler are respectable citizens - by night, they are smugglers and poachers.
A mad doctor uses patients at his isolated psychiatric institute as subjects in his attempts to create longevity by surgically installing an artificial gland in their skulls.
When disillusioned Swedish knight Antonius Block returns home from the Crusades to find his country in the grips of the Black Death, he challenges Death to a chess match for his life.