Memories of Matsuko (2006)

It is the present day and Matsuko's nephew, Sho, is cleaning out his dead aunt's filthy apartment. Through a series of encounters, he gradually learns of his aunt's checkered life. Matsuko, in fact, seems at time to be speaking to Sho from the grave as he becomes the audience's guide to her life. We first see Matsuko in the early 1970s as a popular junior high school teacher in her hometown until a fateful day when she imprudently assumes the blame for a theft by oen of her favorite pupils, Ryu. She loses her job, her reputation and subsequestly, the welcome of even her own family. We then travel back to her childhood to see her desperately seeking the affections of a father who appears to care more for Matsuko's chronically ill sister. Alone and adrift in the world, Matsuko begins hooking up with any man who will return her affections even if it is accompanied by physical abuse. Whith each man, she is convinced she's found true happiness only to see each man abandon her, incapable of coping with her smothering love. Even as Matsuko falls from grace to sex trade worker and even prison inmate, she remains undeterred in her quest for love. When she si reunited with Ryu and learns of his longtime admiration towards her, she believes she's at last found her true prince. But Ryu leads a violent and dangerous existence as a gangster, and ultimately decides the only way to shield Matsuko from pain is by disappearing from her life forever. Matsuko begins to fall apart, never fully realizing the extent to which those in her life have loved her.