In Tokyo, the bigger the company you work for, the smaller the flat.
Joining Paris, je t'aime and New York, I Love You in the ranks of millennial anthology films set in a single city (and often told from the perspective of outsiders) is 2008's Tokyo!, which I taped off the Sundance Channel a couple months back and am just getting around to. The first segment, called "Interior Design," was co-written and directed by Michel Gondry, based on the graphic novel Cecil and Jordan in New York by Gabrielle Bell, who also collaborated on the script. It's about an aspiring filmmaker (Ryo Kase) who's given to flights of fancy and moves to Tokyo with his unambitious girlfriend (Ayako Fujitani) to look for work. While they get on their feet they're staying in the cramped flat of a school friend, but Fujitani increasingly feels like she's unnoticed and unwanted, which leads to a bizarre change of lifestyle for her.
The second segment, colorfully named "Merde," was written and directed by Leos Carax and stars Denis Lavant as a lanky green-suited creep with a milky-white eye, a pointy red beard and gnarled finger- and toenails who emerges from the sewer system periodically to bug random people on the street. He's only a nuisance at first, but then he finds a stash of explosives underground and suddenly his attacks have a body count. After he's arrested, someone is located who can speak his impenetrable language -- a French lawyer played by Jean-Francois Balmer -- and who agrees to defend him. (You can imagine how well that goes, especially after Lavant reveals how much he hates all people, especially the Japanese.) The action is punctuated by the occasional Godzilla roar to remind the audience that we're dealing with a monster here. He just doesn't have the stature of everyone's favorite radioactive lizard.
The final segment of the film, entitled "Shaking Tokyo," was written and directed by Bong Joon-ho and is about a hikikomori or shut-in (Teruyuki Kagawa) who has been holed up in his flat for over ten years and in that time has made made orderly stacks of all his empty toilet paper rolls, pizza boxes, bottles, cans and the like. He also never makes eye contact with any of the delivery people who come to his door until he meets the girl who brings his pizza (Yu Aoi) and she faints in his doorway during an earthquake. While she's unconscious he notices she has a computer power button (labeled "coma") tattooed on her leg and when he presses it she instantly revives and doesn't say anything about the incident. Later on, when he learns she's confined herself to her own flat, having been inspired by his "perfect" lifestyle, he has to overcome his extreme agoraphobia and crosses town on foot (passing a pizza-delivering robot on the way because of course they have those in Japan) to rescue her from a life of isolation. It's a sweet ending to the story and the film as a whole.