meta: Drama

The great masterwork of modern Japanese fiction, by one of its all-time luminaries, has been translated multiple times, each version its own testament to the complexities of translation as an art

An all-new translation of Osamu Dazai's bleak masterwork brings fresh clarity and immediacy to a staple of modern Japanese literature

On having a reckoning with the god-emperor of modern manga, in a restored English-language edition at last

Hirokazu Kore-eda's debut feature, twenty years on, remains an ominous and poignant masterwork

A gorgeous adaptation of the acclaimed manga, and a story with a hard moral question: Who gets to be redeemed?

Almost forty years later, this jet-black comedy about a one-man nuclear terrorist ring remains an absurdist masterwork

What starts as an unlikely (and potentially squicky) romance becomes a more ambitious story about kinship between those with buried dreams

It's normally bad to call a movie 'stagy', but Kon Ichikawa's kabuki tragedy revels in it to great effect

Kon Ichikawa's 1955 film version of Sōseki Natsume's classic novel adapts it with fidelity, intelligence, and just enough changes to be stimulating

Makoto Shinkai's blockbuster is an eyeful and a heartful, but look closely and you'll see the seams