A high school girl who suffers from bullying escapes to a building rooftop in her free time. There she meets a middle-aged salaryman who plans to jump to his death and a friendship develops between the two.
Hanae and Chōko are two hard-working sisters living in the countryside with their father. Hanae runs a snack shop and Chōko works in a hair salon. Teruhiko, Hanae's first boyfriend from high school who now works for a large company in Tokyo, visits the snack shop one day. They become reacquainted and Teruhiko wishes to marry Hanae. Romantic complications ensue when he meets Chōko.
In The Flesh follows three sex workers, Shabana (who works the highways near Mumbai), Bhaskar (a transgendered hijra person who sells sex to men in Calcutta), and Uma, a former theater actress who lives in a Calcutta brothel. The film follows their daily routines, from picking up customers and sex to their private social lives to violence and activism.
Sōichi Naruse is a projectionist who has worked at the local cinema for nearly 50 years. Since the death of his wife Harue 10 years before, he and his daughter Harue spend a lonely existence together. When Sōichi's health fails, Harue arranges for a housekeeper to care for her father. Believing Akane to be possessed of the spirit of his wife Harue, Sōichi recovers.
The film explores the past and present lives of characters during a night's taxi ride. The characters include Masayo a divorced woman who works as a taxi driver, and Sakaki, a diabetic passenger who wants to go to an isolated beach.
Etsuko, the wife of the respected pharmacist Mikami, is lusted after by Mikami's assistant, Numakura. Numakura plans to poison Mikami and to claim Etsuko as his own, but Viagra is substituted for the poison, thereby thwarting Numakura's plans.
A pair of college students from the small California town of Montgomery go to the local lovers lane, Hidden Point, to have sex, and are stabbed to death by a hooded figure with a hook for a hand. The next night, another young couple is attacked in the same area. The man's throat is slit, and the woman narrowly escapes, being chased through the woods and to the road, where she flags down a passing car. As the ten-year college reunion, student prom, and tourist season are all fast approaching, the mayor and governor call the FBI for assistance, to the annoyance of the case's initial investigator, Deputy Sarah Blake. Sarah believes these killings could be connected to the similar and still unsolved murders of her sister Laura and Laura's boyfriend, which occurred ten years ago at Hidden Point.