Shinji Sōmai

Directing

Shinji Sōmai

Born — Died

1948-01-13 — 2001-09-09

Place of birth

Morioka, Iwate Prefecture, Japan

Known for

Directing

Credits

15 titles

Shinji Sōmai (相米 慎二, Sōmai Shinji, 13 January 1948 – 9 September 2001) was a Japanese film director. He was born in Morioka, Iwate Prefecture, and was brought up in Hokkaido. Somai began his career in 1975 as an assistant director with Nikkatsu Co., one of Japan's leading film production companies, after he dropped out of Chuo University. Somai made made his debut as a director in 1980 with The Terrible Couple - an adaptation of a popular boys' manga of the time. The film deals with the trials and tribulations of adolescence, presaging a long thread of Somai works in which young people are called upon to test their capabilities while discovering the unreliable nature of adult society. In So…

Known for

Behind the camera

Typhoon Club poster
6.5

Offering a caustic immersion into the lives of disaffected junior high students on the cusp of adulthood, the film takes place over the 5-day period before, during, and after a ferocious, seemingly liberating typhoon, which six of the students endure while marooned in their school.

Typhoon Club

1985

Moving poster
7.5

Physically separated from her father and at odds with her distraught mother, a girl must negotiate her own passage to maturity.

Moving

1993

Love Hotel poster
6.7

A call-girl named Yumi and Tetsuro, a married man with a debt to the yakuza, have a violent rendezvous in a cheap love hotel. Years later, haunted by the memory of that night, they reconnect and begin a strange love affair. Determined to finish what they started, they return to the scene of their first macabre passion.

Love Hotel

1985

The Friends poster
7.0

A delightful and moving coming-of-age story. One summer, three young boys take an increasing interest in an eccentric old man who lives alone in a house surrounded by an overgrown garden. The boys form a bond with the recluse and set about weeding and replanting the garden.

The Friends

1994

Sailor Suit and Machine Gun poster
7.0

A high-school girl inherits a declining yakuza organization, which seeks to repair its fortunes under her leadership.

Sailor Suit and Machine Gun

1981

P. P. Rider poster
6.0

Three high-school students tangle with indulgent yakuza and lackadaisical police as they set out in search of the class bully, who has been kidnapped.

P. P. Rider

1983

The Catch poster
6.7

A young man tries to overcome the hostility of his girlfriend's father, a tuna fisherman, by getting the father to teach him the trade's secrets.

The Catch

1983

Luminous Woman poster
7.0

A hulking man from the country pursues his beloved to the underworld of Tokyo nightclubs, where he finds work as a sideshow wrestler and becomes involved with a faded opera singer.

Luminous Woman

1987

Wait and See poster
7.3

A salaryman faces a major life change as his firm undergoes financial difficulties. To add to his troubles, a man claiming to be his long-estranged father shows up at his house requesting shelter. One of the best of Somai's seriocomic studies of the messiness of family life.

Wait and See

1998

Tokyo Heaven poster
6.6

A pampered young model is killed in a traffic accident. Given the chance to return to earth, she becomes involved with the advertising executive who is trying to cover up her death. A blend of fantasy and trenchant realism in which Somai uses the ethereal glow of advertising images to comment on the transience of life.

Tokyo Heaven

1990

Lost Chapter of Snow: Passion poster
6.9

Iori, taken from an orphanage by a family for domestic work, runs away and is adopted and raised by two young men. Ten years later, she crosses paths with her former step-sister, who is soon poisoned to death, Iori being the prime suspect.

Lost Chapter of Snow: Passion

1985

Kaza-hana poster
5.6

A government employee meets a hostess of a "pink club," and together they set out on a journey.

Kaza-hana

2001

Dreamy Fifteen poster
6.2

Aspiring to be admitted to a good university and to become a lawyer, Tasiro Yuusuke, a tenth-grader from Kyushu, enrolls in a prestigious high school in Tokyo. Plans are made for him to live in his uncle's house, part of which is rented out while his uncle is abroad on business. A realtor's mistakes leaves Tasiro sharing the house with Kei Yamaba, the most beautiful girl in the school, who is also his classmate. There is the risk that their unexpected 'co-habitation' will be discovered by the school authorities.

Dreamy Fifteen

1980

Beloved Woman poster
5.0

Based on the novel by Tetsuro Miura, this 60-minute PV (Promotional Video) stars Aya Katsuragi.

Beloved Woman

1985

100 High School Girls: Secret Motel Report poster
9.0

Investigative reporter Hayakawa Junko visits a town that was once the scene of a scandal involving mass prostitution to cover the activities of high school girls at motels. What Junko sees there is a flood of sexual promiscuity among high school girls that is even more shocking than what has been reported in the media. During her investigation, Junko hears a rumor that it is a "high school version of Romeo and Juliet," in which two high school students, Ryuichi and Yuki, fell in love but their families opposed their relationship, so they cut off each other's little fingers.

100 High School Girls: Secret Motel Report

1975