Nymphomaniac: Vol. I

Heli Valkonen is desperately in love with her husband. But Matti is just not in the mood. He is only interested in playing computer games, dressed in worn out fleece pants. For him, a shoulder massage is the highest form of intimacy. When subtle hints, nice words and fetching clothes won't help, Heli resorts in direct, and increasingly direct action - in vain.

Darius Lovehall is a young black poet in Chicago who starts dating Nina Moseley, a beautiful and talented photographer. While trying to figure out if they've got a "love thing" or are just "kicking it," they hang out with their friends, talking about love and sex. Then Nina tests the strength of Darius' feelings and sets a chain of romantic complications into motion.

After their mother dies and their father leaves them, teenage brothers Tex and Mason McCormick struggle to make it on their own.

A couple checks into a suite in Las Vegas. In flashbacks we see that he's a computer whiz on the verge of becoming a dot.com millionaire, she's a lap dancer at a club. He's depressed, withdrawing from work, missing meetings with investors. He wants a connection, so he offers her $10,000 to spend three nights with him in Vegas, and she accepts with conditions. Is mutual attraction stirring?

Carol White, a Los Angeles housewife in the late 1980s, comes down with a debilitating illness with no clear diagnosis.

The protagonist is Carmen X, a sexy female member of a terrorist gang. She asks her uncle Jean, a washed-up film director if she can borrow his beachside house to make a film with some friends, but they are in fact planning to rob a bank. During the robbery she falls in love with a security guard. The film intercuts between Carmen's escape with the guard, her uncle's attempt to make a comeback film, and a string quartet attempting to perform Beethoven.

A college student gets pregnant without having intercourse, affecting people close and unrelated to her in different ways.

A man tries to warn his brother away from the new girlfriend he brings home during Thanksgiving, but ends up becoming infatuated with her in the process.

Gisela is a young wife and mother, living in a working class German Housing Scheme. She is a supermarket cashier, her husband a delivery driver. The marriage is stale but together they are working their way up into the middle class. George and Gisela evidently knew each other as teenagers. They live on the same scheme and George introduces her to his friend Paul. There is instant mutual attraction. Gisela spontaneously goes to a party that they invite her to that evening, where she and Paul begin a sexual relationship.

Shane O'Shea, a Jersey boy with big dreams, crosses the river in hopes of finding another, more exciting life at Studio 54. When Steve Rubell, the mastermind behind the infamous disco plucks Shane from the sea of faces clamoring to get inside his club, Shane not only gets his foot in the door, but lands a coveted job behind the bar - and a front-row ticket to the most legendary party on the planet.

Aspiring to an easy job as personal physician to a wealthy family, Noboru Yasumoto is disappointed when his first post after medical school takes him to a small country clinic under the gruff doctor Red Beard. Yasumoto rebels in numerous ways, but Red Beard proves a wise and patient teacher. He gradually introduces his student to the unglamorous side of the profession, ultimately assigning him to care for a prostitute rescued from a local brothel.