This is the one that makes you put your phone down and sit in the dark afterward. Yozo Oba's four-episode slide through No Longer Human is the anchor, and Takeshi Obata's character designs give that self-loathing a face too handsome to look away from. Kokoro gets told twice, once from each side of the same betrayal, and the second pass rearranges everything you decided in the first. Then Hell Screen drops Yoshihide watching a carriage burn to get his painting right, and Sakuraguchi's bandit hauling severed heads to a woman under the cherry blossoms, and you realize the anthology isn't collecting sad stories, it's collecting the exact moment a person stops being able to live with themselves. Purists will note Kokoro takes real liberties with Soseki. Watch it anyway, then go read the books, which is the whole point.

Six works from Japan's modern literary canon become a psychological drama anthology. A high school student drifts into alienation, depression and drug use that marks his life for years. A young man in the Meiji era forms a friendship with an older man he calls Sensei, in a tale of isolation, egoism and guilt. A mountain bandit abducts a woman in the 12th century, and a love story unfolds between them. Melos struggles through hardship to save the life of his friend. The Buddha notices a cruel criminal in Hell and, recalling a single act of mercy toward a spider, lowers a spider's thread as a chance to climb out. A renowned artist commissioned to paint the Buddhist Hell torments a lord's staff so he can see what he must depict, and the household sinks into madness.