In its deliberate pacing and thoughtfulness, Daihachi Yoshida’s new film Teki Cometh is characteristic of the Japanese filmmaker’s career. The feature, which has its world premiere at the 2024 Tokyo International Film Festival, and is competing in the festival’s main competition, is yet another literary adaptation from a director who is an avid reader.

“Right at the start of the pandemic, the bookshops were closed, and so I reread books I had. One of those was Teki [title of the original book and the film in Japanese, meaning enemy]. People around the world being unable to go outside and meet others, it was something akin to everyone living an elderly lifestyle like the main character in the story,” recalls Yoshida, talking to The Hollywood Reporter on the day of the Tokyo fest line-up announcement.

Literary adaptations have proved incredibly fruitful for Yoshida. Following two decades of making commercials, music videos, shorts and TV dramas, he made his feature debut with Funuke Show Some Love, You Losers! in 2007, which was based on the novel by Yukiko Motoya. The film won him domestic plaudits and an invitation to Critics’ Week at Cannes. But he is probably best known internationally for 2012’s quirky high school drama The Kirishima Thing, based on a novel by Ryo Asai. That film landed Yoshida Japan‘s Academy Awards for best picture and director, as well as an unusually long theatrical run. Two years later, Pale Moon, based on a novel by Mitsuyo Kakuta, was in the main competition at Tokyo.

In Teki Cometh, a feature adaptation of a book by celebrated Japanese novelist Yasutaka Tsutsui, the protagonist, played by Kyozo Nagastuka, is a retired professor of French literature who gives the odd guest lecture and plans his own end based on when his money will run out. Old friends and former students come to visit. During one of his rare excursions, he encounters an attractive young French literature student played by Yumi Kawai, recently seen in Netflix’s Extremely Inappropriate. The monochrome cinematography evokes times gone by and lines of reality and imagination are blurred. 

“I had a completely different reaction to the book to when I first read it in my thirties, reading it again as I approached 60,” Yoshida says. “I was aware that I was getting older and had experienced the death of several people close to me, and that I would not live another 40 or 50 years. It lit a spark in me and I began to think about if it were to film this, how I would do it.”

After writing the script, Yoshida showed it to the book’s prolific and sometimes outspoken author Tsutsui, who celebrated his ninetieth birthday a few days before the festival line-up press conference. Tsutsui gave his blessing, emphasizing only that the story is not about dementia and that the protagonist actively throws himself into his fantasies.

Veteran actor Nagatsuka studied and worked in France in his youth. While there, he appeared as a Chinese general in a French comedy (Les Chinois à Paris) largely by virtue of being one of the few East Asians in Paris in the early 1970s, but triggering his interest in acting. However, the French connection with Teki Cometh is merely a coincidence, according to Yoshida.  

“The reason I shot in black and white was because nobody stopped me,” he says with a smile. “That still doesn’t explain why. I thought monochrome has a restrained feel that suited the quiet and somewhat stoic life of the main character. But when I shot the film, I felt that it has a ‘rich’ quality to it that maximizes the imagination of the viewer, including myself. So, now I want to ask people who are making films in color why they are choosing to do so.”

Multiple scenes of food and coffee preparation establish the rhythm of the protagonist’s existence but Yoshida had resigned himself to the fact that the fare would not look as appetizing without color.

“But the staff in charge of the cooking were so talented that I thought it looked so delicious even though it was in black and white, and as I was editing the film it made me really, really hungry.”

As with the division between fantasy and the real world, the nature of the mysterious ‘enemy’ of the title is left somewhat ambiguous.

“It’s an enemy from the north, which historically for Japanese people would mean Russia. However, the main character’s enemies can be easily interpreted as death or old age. But as I was making the film, I gradually realized that everyone, regardless of age, has enemies, and they can be defined as a goal, a difficulty to face or a reason for living. I think it is one of the elements that are necessary for all human beings.”