etsuo

A bridge inspector, the wife of an Okazu-ya owner, and a lawyer feature in three semi-unrelated stories.

The bridge inspector seeks justice against a declared-insane street killer who killed three people, one of which was his beloved wife.

The wife of the Okazya-ya goes through the motions of life, looking after her mother-in-law and indifferent/hostile husband.

The lawyer is a gay young professional with a live-in lover.

By turns, "Life with all of the boring parts" has the bridge inspector try to get the gay lawyer to seek damages from the killer. The wife happens upon a "special water scam" that starts at the bridge inspector's workplace. The lawyer gets drunk, criticizes and drives away his lover. How will these ordinary people resolve these "bumps in the road"? A Shochiku production that moves as slowly as the river...

Oh wait, that's too highbrow for Fox TV. No this is more like "Voyagers!" for the-short-attention-span-generation. Do we have a character who knows next-to-nothing-about-History-and-just-wants-to-get-it-on? Check. Do we have a character who could go on and on about period minutiae even as a horse deposits road apples on his shoes? Check. Do we have a smart woman with common sense and is another "Ellen Ripley"? Check. Now turn the comedy writers loose on this mess, stand back, and...why isn't anything happening? It will have to do, I guess, since "Timeless" isn't coming back and "History is Bunk." So Junior found out how to build a "duffel bag time machine while going through his father's papers, found Love in 1775 Massachusetts, (supposedly)kept The American Revolution from happening, and dragged in a pedantic History professor to fix the time line. One stays, one comes into the 21st century, and surprise, surprise, History has been changed. Stay tuned for "A Sound of Thunder," network TV-lite version.

A couple in a Yonezaki hotel room come to blows, as the man refuses the woman's request. She takes a steak knife from the room service setting and attempts to stab him. The man dodges her attack and leaves hurriedly. The next morning, the body of the woman is discovered, stabbed through the heart with a steak knife. A couple of lawyers step off an overnight bus, having been hired the night before by the prime suspect, Shimazu Kuniaki. Sakata Sadato, a former Yonezaki public prosecutor, grumbles that his assistant, Kosaka Chihiro kept his up with her snoring. As they stroll into town, they are picked up by a car sent by Shimazu. At the jail, they are scolded by Shimazu for not having taken the Bullet train and arrived before today's first trial session. Sakata confronts Shimazu, and demands that he never lies to the duo. At the first trial, a former colleague of Sakata's, Shoji Mao, is in charge of prosecution and seems to have an airtight murder case against Shimazu. Seemingly irrelevant details in the case surface, which leads Sakata and Kosaka to investigate a prior case which involved the victim, Hamada Mitsuko, her ex-husband, a GP doctor, their son, and Shimazu. Witnesses for the defense are found, and a different picture appears, until the final witness' testimony (and lack of it) reveal that Justice has been subverted.