Yoshimura’s second (and earliest surviving) feature follows the private lives and simmering emotions of a small group of hospital employees as a power struggle unfolds among the hospital’s administration.

Starring legendary actors Setsuko Hara and Masayuki Mori, this especially acclaimed effort from Yoshimura chronicles the fallout from Japan’s defeat in World War II and its effects on a single family.

The conflict between two sisters—one a geisha, one a salarywoman—becomes a powerful parable about the clash of the old and the new in this immaculate melodrama, starring Rashomon’s Machiko Kyō.

Kazuo Hasegawa stars as the titular prince, the emperor’s womanizing bastard son who cannot shake his fascination with his father’s young bride in Yoshimura’s admirable attempt to adapt Murasaki Shikibu’s early-11th-century novel.

A father’s suicide financially imperils his family of textile workers in Yoshimura’s powerful social drama, again scripted by Kaneto Shindō and set in the Nishijin district in Kyoto.

Among Yoshimura’s complex and political works, this episodic film, set in the early 1930s, follows the life of a young left-wing student activist disenchanted by the increasingly hawkish state of Japanese society.

Arguably Yoshimura’s masterpiece, this delicate, dimensional melodrama is a deeply moving chronicle of a woman confronting her own values in a rapidly modernizing Japan—a feast for both the eyes and the emotions.

An economic tragicomedy originally meant to be the final project of Kenji Mizoguchi, this wry, unsentimental parable on the perils of capitalism follows a peasant family on their journey to deranging wealth.

A young man’s political consciousness dawns in this moving drama, scripted by Kaneto Shindō and set during the Taisho period, about a woman who is forced to work in a geisha house to cover her son’s tuition fees.

Two bar proprietresses try to make ends meet in the Ginza district of Tokyo in this typically incisive study of Japanese society from Yoshimura, here working with Mikio Naruse’s frequent scriptwriter, Sumie Tanaka.

Yoshimura’s complex, critical tribute to traditional Japanese dance follows the rivalry between two dancers (Machiko Kyo and Ayako Wakao) in the postwar period and the contemporaneous emergence of new forms of femininity.

Yoshimura teamed up with the great Mariko Okada for this delicate parable on the effects of modernity, centered on a woman who inherits a traditional sweets shop in Kyoto.

A thickly atmospheric chronicle of forbidden desire, this uncannily frank exploration of sexual politics in 20th-century Japan is at once one of Yoshimura’s starkest and most sensitive works, starring Ayako Wakao as a geisha who becomes entangled with her late lover’s son.