Shell and Joint

Directed by Isamu Hirabayashi

With Mariko Tsutsui, Keisuke Horibe, Aiko Sato, Hiromi Kitagawa and Koharu Kusumi

Nitobe and Sakamoto are childhood friends who now work at the front desk of a capsule hotel. Nitobe has a particular fondness for philosophy and crustaceans. Sakamoto, meanwhile, is fixated on suicide. The capsule hotel draws a variety of guests, including a Finnish mother who has lost her child, a fugitive woman, and a researcher studying Daphnia. None of their lives ever intersect. They exist, but never cross, like cells in a capsule hotel. The themes of life and death are explored through a fragmentary view of the characters’ lives.