The Happiness of the Katakuris 2001

The Katakuris are a four-generation family of failures: Masao Katakuri, Kenji Sawada, his wife Terue, Keiko Matsuzaka, his father Jinpei, Tetsurō Tamba, his formerly criminal son Masayuki, Shinji Takeda, his divorced daughter Shizue, Naomi Nishida, their young child Yurie, Tamaki Miyazaki who narrates the story, and their dog Pochi. The family uses Masao’s redundancy pay to buy a large old house perched beside Mount Fuji, a place they christen the White Lovers’ Inn with the dream of turning it into a welcoming bed-and-breakfast for travelers.

They hope the nearby road will be widened to bring in guests, but for now the house sits largely empty, a lonely landmark waiting for visitors. When a first guest finally arrives, he unexpectedly takes his own life during the night, and the Katakuris choose to conceal the death in an effort to protect the fledgling business. Not long after, a second guest—a sumo wrestler—dies in a private moment with his much younger girlfriend, and the pattern seems to repeat itself: each new arrival ends up dead, whether by suicide, accident, or murder.

As the backyard fills with bodies, the family’s attempt to hide the truth spirals into a tense, comic nightmare of fear, guilt, and increasingly drastic lies. The situation is amplified by Shizue’s romance with a man who calls himself Richard Sagawa, Kiyoshiro Imawano, a U.S. naval officer claiming to be Queen Elizabeth II’s nephew. His arrival triggers a race to uncover the truth behind the disappearances, even as a rumbling volcano nearby threatens to erupt and reveal everything.