Screening in competition at the 37th edition of the Tokyo International Film Festival, Yoshida Daihachi’s Teki Cometh is based on a 1998 novel by Tsutsui Yasutaka about a retired professor called Watanabe Gisuke (Nagatsuka Kyozo). He is quietly living out his last days when he receives a mysterious message on his PC that his “enemy” (teki) is coming from the north.
The film won three prizes at the Tokyo festival, which unspooled from October 28 to November 6 of last year: Best Film, Best Director (Yoshida) and Best Actor (Nagatsuka).
Filmed in black-and-white, the film begins as a record of Watanabe’s daily existence, from his meticulous meal preparations – he is a something of a gourmet – to his platonic relationship with a former student (Takeuchi Kumi) that smoulders with an unstated but evident mutual passion.
But once the “enemy” announces its presence, the film segues into darker, more disturbing territory as Watanabe’s unquiet dreams seem to invade his waking life. His dead wife (Kurosawa Asuka) resents what she views as his betrayal – and refuses to remain a mere ghost.
When scripting the film, Yoshida said in a pre-TIFF interview that he updated the novel’s descriptions of Watanabe’s interactions with the digital world, as social media has replaced the chat rooms of the 1990s. But Watanabe himself remains what Yoshida describes as a “traditionalist, like the Japanese-style house he lives in.”
His protagonist was a professor of French literature, which is not exactly a traditionally Japanese pursuit. “He is a symbol of the Japanese who live in a tatami room but drink Coca-Cola, who are always in between Western and Japanese culture,” Yoshida said. “For Japanese people, this stance is very natural and commonplace.”
Yoshida incorporated autobiographical elements into the film, including his depictions of Watanabe’s over-active dream life. “When I was young, I had many dreams that could have been made into movies,” he said. “But as I got older, I had more dreams about things I saw yesterday, or about worries I had about tomorrow. Then, I got to the point when I couldn’t tell the difference between dream and reality, so when I woke up, I would think for a while, ‘Oh, what a terrible thing I did.’ I’m having more and more dreams that are realistic in a bad way,” he said.
Yoshida confesses that he detects other overlaps between his life and that of his 77-year-old hero, who feels his world getting smaller even as he tries to find new beginnings. “I turned 60 last year,” Yoshida said. “Before that I had been able to work without thinking too much about my age, but now when I start work at six in the morning, I feel a little bit sick. I am also thinking more about what I should do in the future, not only for work, but also for how I should live my life.”
“This is true for not only for me, but also for the Japanese people as a whole. There are more and more old people around me, and the number of children is decreasing. That makes me feel uneasy,” he said.
Consequently, when Yoshida reread Tsutsui’s novel after an interval of years, its story of an elderly man trying to restart his life while pursued by his past struck him as timely. “I thought its theme was a good one for me to work on,” he said.
He did not, however, make Teki Cometh to impart a message about the present moment. “I really like the feeling that the audience is active and engaged,” he said. “So, I hope this film can establish that kind of relationship with the audience. Not one-sided, but more like a dream that you interpret with your own imagination. A dream that you want to dream again.”
Mark Schilling