Agnes "Astra" Huston, a fortune teller at a run-down fair, is found strangled in her bedroom. As the police question five suspects, their interactions with her are shown in flashbacks from their point of view.

Akiyama is an intern, disgusted with the noise pollution caused by the bullet trains and the heart attacks that noise has been causing in older hospital patients, plots to disrupt and, in ten days, destroy a unit of the operation. He warns the Japan National Railway, that, if nothing is done to reduce the noise, he will derail a bullet train. Takigawa is the police detective sent to stop him.

Sergio is a brooding, alienated man who works as a trash collector in Lisbon by day and roams the city streets by night seeking rough, anonymous sex with men. One night he meets a man who seems to be the embodiment of his tormented fantasies, and he becomes obsessed with the stranger until loneliness and unfulfilled desire propel him finally into a dark and dangerous animalistic state.

A teenager is determines to clear the name of a black friend who is accused of murder.

Given a pardon from jail, Roy Earle gets back into the swing of things as he robs a swanky resort.

A Holocaust survivor moves to Israel and experiences difficulty adjusting to life.

Professor Wilson discovers a lost Akita puppy on his way home. Despite objections from his wife, Hachi endears himself to the family and grows to be Parker's loyal companion. As their bond grows deeper, a beautiful relationship unfolds.

Saori, a school girl, is molested on the notorious "molester train" of the Hanagawa line and rescued by another school girl who witnesses the act. The girl who rescues her turned out to be a new student of the same high school Saori attends. The mysterious new student Yuriko is rumoured to be a "parent killer". Yuriko then leads Saori and her friends to hunt molesters.

The building of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

When elderly pensioner Umberto Domenico Ferrari returns to his boarding house from a protest calling for a hike in old-age pensions, his landlady demands her 15,000-lire rent by the end of the month or he and his small dog will be turned out onto the street. Unable to get the money in time, Umberto fakes illness to get sent to a hospital, giving his beloved dog to the landlady's pregnant and abandoned maid for temporary safekeeping.

Women enter and exit a science fiction author's life over the course of a few years after the author loses the woman he considers his one true love.

A charming psychopath tries to coerce a tennis star into his theory that two strangers can commit the perfect crime by exchanging murders—each killing the other’s most-hated person.