The Flag, Class A, Grade 4.

Fleeing a distressing family situation, Eiko, a very young girl, becomes an apprentice to Miyoharu, a veteran geisha. Both, determined to preserve their professional integrity, must face the selfishness and ambition of several petty people.

In a distinctly contemporary Tokyo that looks backwards to the city’s disappearing past, Yoko is a writer investigating the life of a modernist composer of the 1930s. She is pregnant by a man she does not want to marry and has found a kindred spirit in a used bookstore owner who aids her research.

While stopped at a roadside phone booth for transmitting his work through the Internet to the university, Professor Hideki Satomi finds a scrap of newspaper with the picture of his five-year-old daughter Nana in the obituary section.

From 1928 to 1946, the lives of 12 young people and their school teacher in a poor Japanese village are profoundly affected by historical events and personal circumstances.

The elderly Shukishi and his wife, Tomi, take the long journey from their small seaside village to visit their adult children in Tokyo. Their elder son, Koichi, a doctor, and their daughter, Shige, a hairdresser, don't have much time to spend with their aged parents, and so it falls to Noriko, the widow of their younger son who was killed in the war, to keep her in-laws company.

The winds of change blow as a family grapples with unemployment, alienation, mistrust and a lack of communication. When a Japanese salaryman loses his job to outsourcing to China, it's simply the beginning of a series of shattering incidents, leading to the implosion of the family unit.

A mysterious creature destroys part of the moon and then warns that, if it is not destroyed before March of the following year, Earth will be next. It also demands to become the homeroom teacher of Class E, a third-year class at Kunugigaoka High School.

Soyo, a student in a school with only six students, develops feelings for the new student, Hiromi, who has moved from Tokyo.

A girl mysteriously receives advice from her future self and as a result her group of friends, along with a newly arrived, troubled classmate, learn how to be better friends and a better community.

Daikichi learns that his recently deceased grandfather has an illegitimate daughter with an unknown mother. The girl's name is Rin and she is just 6 years old. Everybody in Daikichi's family looks at the girl as an embarrassment and wants no part of her. Disgusted by his family's attitude, Daikichi decides to raise Rin by himself, even though he has no experience raising a child and is still single.

An elderly couple journey to Tokyo to visit their grown children, only to find them preoccupied and self-involved.

An American village is visited by some unknown life form which leaves the women of the village pregnant. Nine months later, the babies are born, and they all look normal, but it doesn't take the "parents" long to realize that the kids are not human or humane.