Live-Action ‘Ame no Naka no Yokujō’ Film to Screen at Tokyo Int’l Film Fest – News

The 37th Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) announced in a press conference on Wednesday that the live-action film of Yoshiharu Tsuge‘s “Ame no Naka no Yokujō” (Lust in the Rain) manga short story will screen in the festival’s competition category on October 30, November 3, and November 4.

The film will screen in theaters in Japan on November 29.

The film stars Ryō Narita as Yoshio, Eriko Nakamura as Fukuko, Gō Morita as Imori, and Naoto Takenaka as Oyaji. Other cast members include Tomomitsu Adachi, Yuki Nakanishi, Yūya Matsuura, Makoto Tsuchi, Kaori Momo, and Kū Ijima, and Li Xing. Shinzo Katayama is directing the film, and is also penning the script alongside Takamase Ōe.

The film’s story centers on Yoshio, a poor and struggling manga artist who lives in Kitamachi. He is sent by Oyaji, the landlord of his apartment who is also engaged in other shady businesses, to help a novelist called Imori move in, and meets a recently-divorced woman named Fukuko. Yoshio is immediately bewitched by her beauty, even though she is already seeing someone else. In the meantime, Imori establishes an advertising agency, borrowing the name of a larger agency from the wealthier Minamicho, in order to sell his novel. Yoshio ends up helping with Imori’s efforts, and somehow Imori and Fukuko come to live together with Yoshio.

Tsuge published the short manga in Hokutoh Shoboh‘s Yagyō magazine in 1981.

Tsuge was a pioneer of gekiga (“dramatic pictures”) comics, a genre named by Yoshihiro Tatsumi in 1957 to describe an alternative style of manga that stresses realism and is aimed at adults. He is perhaps best known for his 1968 manga Neji-Shiki (“Screw-Style“), a surreal story about a man wandering a desolate, post-war Japan.

Teruo Ishii directed a live-action film adaptation of Neji-Shiki in 1998. Panik House released the film in North America under the title Screwed.

Drawn & Quarterly is releasing the complete works of Yoshiharu Tsuge in a seven-volume set. Ryan Holmberg is translating the works.

The 37th Tokyo International Film Festival will run from October 28 to November 6.

The festival’s “Gala Selection” includes the screening of the live-action film of Masayuki Kusumi and Jiro Taniguchi‘s Kodoku no Gourmet (Solitary Gourmet). The festival lists the film’s title as The Gourmand: The Solitary Gourmet.

The festival’s “Animation Selection” will screen films such as A Few Moments of Cheers, The Colors Within, Ghost Cat Anzu, Look Back, Make a Girl, Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window, Kurayukaba, and a 50th anniversary 4K remaster screening of Space Battleship Yamato, among others.

Source: 37th Tokyo International Film Festival press conference (Egan Loo)