[7] Tanaka returned to television drama in late 1981 with the Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS) series Making Memories (想い出つくり, Omoide zukuri) about three office ladies (OL) reaching their 25th birthdays.
[13] After Oshin, Tanaka returned to feature films with starring roles in the comedy Capone Cries a Lot which was distributed by Shochiku in February 1985, and in the August 1985 drama Demon (夜叉, Yasha) opposite Ken Takakura.
[14] Over the next ten years, Tanaka mostly worked in television, appearing in a dozen TV movies[1] and in the lavish NHK historical series chronicling the period of the Meiji Restoration, As If In Flight (翔ぶが如く, Tobu ga Gotoku), which ran in 48 episodes from January to December 1990.
[16] In May 1988, Tanaka starred as Kino (Catherine in the novel) in Wuthering Heights, director Yoshishige Yoshida's film adaptation of the classic Emily Brontë novel set in medieval Japan.
[17] When director Yōji Yamada reworked a script from his popular Otoko wa Tsurai yo film series after the death of "Tora-san" star Kiyoshi Atsumi as Niji wo Tsukamu Otoko (虹をつかむ男) in December 1996, Tanaka, who had earlier worked with Yamada in Tora-san, the Expert, was chosen to play the true love of a manager of a failing movie theater (Toshiyuki Nishida).
[19] Tanaka continued performing in both film and television roles throughout the 2000s[1] including starring with Ken Takakura in the 2001 Yasuo Furuhata drama, The Firefly (ホタル, Hotaru), about Japanese families after World War II.
[7][25] Tanaka's next film role was a fifty-year-old single woman who meets an old flame while delivering milk in the July 2005 romantic drama The Milkwoman (いつか読書する日, Itsuka dokusho suruhi).
[27] Tanaka voiced the character of the wizard Cob (クモ) in the July 2006 anime movie Tales from Earthsea which was also released in an English language version in the United States in August 2010.