In feudal Japan, during a bloody war between clans, two cowardly and greedy peasants, soldiers of a defeated army, stumble upon a mysterious man who guides them to a fortress hidden in the mountains.
The four turtles travel back in time to the days of the legendary and deadly samurai in ancient Japan, where they train to perfect the art of becoming one. The turtles also assist a small village in an uprising.
Two lost souls visiting Tokyo - the young, neglected wife of a photographer and a washed-up movie star shooting a TV commercial - find an odd solace and pensive freedom to be real in each other's company, away from their lives in America.
Blind traveler Zatoichi is a master swordsman and a masseur with a fondness for gambling on dice games. When he arrives in a village torn apart by warring gangs, he sets out to protect the townspeople.
A member of an elite paramilitary counter-terrorism unit becomes traumatized after witnessing the suicide bombing of a young girl and is forced to undergo retraining. However, unbeknownst to him, he becomes a key player in a dispute between rival police divisions, as he finds himself increasingly involved with the sister of the girl he saw die.
The classic story of English POWs in Burma forced to build a bridge to aid the war effort of their Japanese captors. British and American intelligence officers conspire to blow up the structure, but Col. Nicholson, the commander who supervised the bridge's construction, has acquired a sense of pride in his creation and tries to foil their plans.
Dolls takes puppeteering as its overriding motif, which relates thematically to the action provided by the live characters. Chief among those tales is the story of Matsumoto and Sawako, a young couple whose relationship is about to be broken apart by the former's parents, who have insisted their son take part in an arranged marriage to his boss' daughter.
In the second part of this manga adaptation, Tairaku Arihiko, who is a teacher at a local high school, lives with his student Shirakaba Aya and things are becoming steamier. As she becomes aggressive with her love for him he has to navigate his responsibility and job, his cute student and her thug father.
Iwane Sakazaki returns to his homeland and gets caught in the middle of an incident that results in the tragic death of two of his best friends from childhood. He decides to leave his domain, parting with his fiancée Nao, and becomes a vagrant masterless samurai with nothing more to lose. Iwane drifts to Edo, filleting eels during the day and working as a bodyguard at night for Imazuya, a reputable money exchanger. He gradually wins the trust of the people around him because of his mellow nature, the chivalrous way he treats everyone with courtesy, and his skills of swords. One day, he learns that Imazuya is being targeted in a conspiracy to sabotage a new monetary system implemented by the government, and Iwane decides to protect the people who have given him support.
Nathan Algren is an American hired to instruct the Japanese army in the ways of modern warfare, which finds him learning to respect the samurai and the honorable principles that rule them. Pressed to destroy the samurai's way of life in the name of modernization and open trade, Algren decides to become an ultimate warrior himself and to fight for their right to exist.
A mysterious spacecraft captures Russian and American space capsules and brings the two superpowers to the brink of war. James Bond investigates the case in Japan and comes face to face with his archenemy Blofeld.