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Audition (Ôdishon)

Shigeharu Aoyama visits his wife Ryoko in hospital, where she dies from an undisclosed illness. Seven years later, Shigeharu's teenage son Shigehiko encourages him to find a new wife. Shigeharu's friend, film producer Yasuhisa Yoshikawa, organizes a fake casting audition at which young women audition for the starring role in a new television series, which was just a ruse for Shigeharu to meet aspiring actresses. Posing as a casting director, Shigeharu is immediately enchanted by an applicant named Asami Yamazaki, who says her career as a ballerina was ended by injuries.

Yasuhisa is suspicious when he cannot reach any of the references in Asami's résumé, including a music producer who has gone missing 18 months earlier. Regardless, Shigeharu pursues her anyway. Asami lives in a tiny apartment, containing little more than a large sack and a telephone; she sits perfectly still next to the phone for four days after the audition, waiting for it to ring. When it finally does, she answers and pretends that she never expected Shigeharu to call. After several dates, she accompanies him to a hotel, where Shigeharu intends to propose marriage. She reveals burn scars on her body and, before having sex, demands that Shigeharu pledge his love to her. Deeply moved, he agrees. In the morning, Shigeharu receives a call from the front desk to inform him that Asami has left.

Shigeharu tries to track down Asami, but all of the contacts on her résumé are dead ends, as Yasuhisa warned. At the dance studio where she said she trained, he finds a man with prosthetic feet who tortured her by burning her legs when she was a child. The bar where Asami said she worked has been abandoned for a year following the murder and dismemberment of the owner, and a local man tells Shigeharu that the police found an extra tongue, an extra ear, and three extra fingers when they recovered the body. Shigeharu has hallucinations of the body parts.

Asami sneaks into Shigeharu's house while he is at work and becomes jealous when she sees a framed picture of Ryoko. She drugs his liquor and kills Gangu, the family dog. Shigeharu comes home, drinks the spiked liquor, and collapses. He has a series of hallucinations, including flashbacks to earlier dates with Asami and sexual experiences with other women from his past. In Asami's apartment, he sees that the sack contains a man who is missing both feet, his tongue, an ear, and three fingers on one hand. He crawls out and begs for food, prompting Asami to vomit into a dog bowl, which he hungrily consumes as Shigeharu watches in horror. He then sees her behead the man with prosthetic feet.

When Shigeharu wakes up, Asami informs him he's been injected with a paralytic agent that disables his muscles but leaves him conscious and able to feel, and begins to torture him with acupuncture needles. She tells him that, just like everyone else, he has failed to love only her. She cannot tolerate his feelings for anyone else, even his own son. She inserts needles into his abdomen and below his eyes. She then cuts off his left foot with a wire saw. As she is halfway through cutting off his right foot, Shigehiko returns home from school and Asami attacks him. Shigeharu appears to suddenly wake up back in the hotel, his current ordeal apparently just a nightmare, though this is actually a false awakening. He proposes marriage to Asami, who accepts. As he falls back asleep, he returns to reality to find Shigehiko fighting Asami. Shigehiko overpowers Asami and kicks her down the stairs, breaking her neck. Shigeharu tells Shigehiko to call the police and stares across the room at the dying Asami, who repeats what she said on one of their dates about her excitement over seeing him again.