Credits: 康 复 (calvision) from Tokyo, Japan / Wikimedia Commons — CC0.
In Japan, Daishi Matsunaga adapts the semi-autobiographical story of Makoto Takayama into a restrained LGBTQ+ melodrama: the meeting of Kōsuke and Ryūta, two men separated by class, money, and family duties, which slides from transaction to attachment, then to grief. First shown in October 2022 in Tokyo, and released in France on October 8, 2025, the film explores, with discretion, power and gratitude.
Two Men, Two Worlds, The Same Rift
Tokyo drizzles. In an interior as neat as a display window, Kōsuke watches himself. He works for a fashion magazine, cultivates muscle, line, and light. Loneliness, too. When he hires Ryūta as a fitness coach, it begins as a transaction. Sessions follow, sweat mixes with glances, then something gives. Love, perhaps. Or its mirage. Daishi Matsunaga, who co-wrote the screenplay with Kyōko Inukai based on Makoto Takayama’s semi-autobiographical novel, films this shift with surgical precision—no excess, no underlining—leaving silences to open hearts.
In Egoist, the city never really roars; it murmurs. The streets of Japan remain off-screen. The essential plays out behind closed doors, among living rooms with sleek furniture, modest kitchens, steam-filled bathrooms. Bodies draw near, speech pulls back. The camera, mobile but discreet, follows this dance of closeness and withdrawal where affection bumps against money. Ryūta, younger, comes from a world where the present can only be bought on credit and where economic dependency poisons impulses. The romance cracks, is renegotiated, falls silent. It never fully surrenders.
A Story That Refuses Single Contours
120 minutes to cross several lives. The narrative arc, at bottom, rests on little: a meeting, an affair, a detour through disappearance, then a reconstitution around a maternal figure. The film’s power lies in a representation rooted in Asian queer cinema of male relationships. Additionally, social class tensions shape emotions, and grief redefines loyalties. Nothing is didactic. Hiroko Sebu lays a music in the background, almost a rumor, while Ryō Hayano’s editing breathes, leaving floating zones where you sense more than you know.
The performances carry far. Ryohei Suzuki, as Kōsuke, inhabits the glossy surface of a man very concerned with his appearance, revealing an intimate, long-standing fracture that professional success does not fill. Hio Miyazawa, as Ryūta, gives simple gestures a raw gravity: apologetic smiles, lowered eyes, the way he holds a cup as if apologizing for existing. Yūko Nakamura asserts, as Kōsuke’s mother, a muted, almost ritual presence that speaks to the weight of ancestors and the difficulty of being oneself under their gaze.
Direction, Ellipsis, and Reserve
The cinematography by Naoya Ikeda works with muffled interiors where shadow tempers colors. Skin is filmed up close, never fetishized. The camera glides, pauses, moves on, like a breath. A claimed sobriety that rejects pathos. The melodrama here does not slam; it seeps. Breaks appear without fuss, via a cut, a closing door. The underlying financial dynamic is perceived through envelopes on the table and promises of “support.” Gradually, this dynamic upends the romantic equilibrium.
Matsunaga seeks neither exemplarity nor thesis. He films the power that slips into love when money is mismanaged. He also shows the shame that clings when one shifts class without a manual. He evokes the fear of being seen as a benefactor lover or a dependent. In this gray area, characters reinvent the words “giver” and “grateful.” They try to inhabit an intimacy that is not a precarious lease.
A Restrained Melodrama, Up To the Turning Point
The film moves with an even pace, faithful to its interiors, until the turning point that recomposes it. No more need be said, except that it involves loss and opens another axis: the bond between Kōsuke and Ryūta’s mother, a figure of frugal, dignified parenthood, granting gratitude an almost liturgical amplitude. Matsunaga then establishes another, unexpected couple where gratitude serves as a common language. The melodrama admits itself, but without heaviness. Indeed, the tear is born from a hand placed on a bowl. Also, it comes from a held breath. Finally, it appears from a silence that lasts a little longer than usual.
Egoist is born of a book by Makoto Takayama, semi-autobiographical, where intimate experience serves as a compass. Kyōko Inukai and Daishi Matsunaga turn it into a screenplay that preserves the modesty of situations and the sobriety of confessions. The adaptation works through ellipsis. Kōsuke’s past surfaces in fragments: an adolescence marked by absence, leaving the provinces, while Ryūta carries the present with all his strength, torn between desire and filial duty. The film’s language remains simple, almost everyday, as if words refuse to name the essential.
The 120-minute length allows for this subtle progression. We follow the protagonists without judging them, lose them, find them again, accompany them in their renunciations. The title, Egoist, holds an ironic puzzle: who are we talking about? The one who gives too much? The one who accepts? Or the ego wounded by unequal places? The moral remains open, in the manner of stories that care for the viewer.
Japan Context: Queer Representations, Scenes and Counter-Shots
In Japan, LGBTQ+ narratives often advance softly. Mainstream production remains stingy with complex queer characters. In recent years, festivals and Asian gay arthouse cinema have been precious relays. Egoist unfolds there naturally: world premiere in October 2022 at the Tokyo International Film Festival, circulation in programs dedicated to diversity, then occasional screenings at events in France where the film finds a receptive echo. This trajectory is significant: it indicates the persistence of an ecosystem where discovery happens through curious theaters and informed audiences.
This reception accompanies a broader evolution. Filmmakers and writers multiply non-schematic portraits, far from caricature. Daishi Matsunaga, already sensitive to these issues, refuses condescending gazes. He chooses proximity: gestures, utensils, money exchanges that do not abolish desire or empathy. In this intimacy, Japanese cinema unfurls an ethic of reserve. Thus, it does not hide pain. Yet it prevents that pain from becoming spectacle.
From Book to Screen: An Assumed Lineage
One reads Egoist by Makoto Takayama as a story of thwarted coming-of-age. The writing moves by brief scenes, by memories that settle. The film takes up this movement but offers the materiality of spaces and the vulnerability of faces. Naoya Ikeda’s cinematography clarifies textures, Ryō Hayano’s editing establishes the breaths that characterize the adaptation, and Hiroko Sebu’s music refrains from commenting. You recognize the virtue of a team effort: nothing pulls the blanket—everything contributes to the same timbre.
Cast: A Rare Alchemy
A word must be said about Ryohei Suzuki and Hio Miyazawa. Together, they outline the oscillation of a romance seeking balance. Suzuki sets the discipline of an orderly man whose success poorly shields him from dread. Miyazawa gives quiet sacrifice an intensity without pathos; he never forces distress, he lets it come. In the second circle, Yūko Nakamura and Sawako Agawa on the Japanese side, parenthood appears in the plural and anchor the film in a sensitive realism where mothers save no one but learn to hold.
Release and Circulation: From Japan to France
Shot and produced in Japan, Egoist had a national release in 2023. In France, Art House handles distribution, with a theatrical release set for October 8, 2025. The release is planned for the arthouse circuit and is supported by festival networks. Independent cinema communities also back it. The VOSTF trailer establishes the film’s line from the start: glances, skin, breath, few words, and that internal movement that leads from attraction to attachment, then to what resists it.
An Ethics of Attention
You leave Egoist thinking of the words left unsaid, the choices left unmade. The film promises no repair. It rather grants heightened attention to the uses of money. It also cares about the blind spots of class. Moreover, the small rituals that allow inhabiting loss also hold its attention. At a time when so many queer stories are asked to explain, convince, reassure, Matsunaga proposes another path: that of a restrained melodrama, wide and discreet, that speaks in a low voice and that, for a long time, continues to warm the hands.