Credits: 康 复 (calvision) from Tokyo, Japan / Wikimedia Commons.
In Japan, Daishi Matsunaga adapts Makoto Takayama’s semi-autobiographical story into a restrained LGBTQ+ melodrama: the meeting of Kōsuke and Ryūta, two men separated by class, money, and family obligations, slips from transaction to attachment, then to mourning. Premiered in Tokyo in October 2022 and released in theaters in France on October 8, 2025, the film explores power and gratitude with delicacy.
Two Men, Two Worlds, One Shared Wound
Tokyo drizzles. In an interior as polished as a storefront window, Kōsuke studies himself. He works for a fashion magazine, cultivates muscle, lines, and light. Loneliness too. When he hires Ryūta as a personal trainer, it is first a transaction. The sessions follow one another, sweat mixes with glances, and then something gives way. 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, without excess or underlining, leaving silence to do the work of opening hearts
In Egoist, the city never really rumbles; it murmurs. The streets of Japan remain offscreen. What matters takes place behind closed doors, among living rooms with sleek furniture, modest kitchens, and bathrooms thick with steam. Bodies draw close, speech recedes. The camera, mobile but discreet, follows this dance of closeness and distance where affection runs up against money. For Ryūta, younger and from a world where the present can only be bought on credit, economic dependency poisons every impulse. The romance cracks, renegotiates itself, falls silent. It never fully gives up.
A Story That Refuses A Single Shape
120 minutes to move through several lives. At heart, the narrative amounts to very little: a meeting, a relationship, a detour through disappearance, then a reconfiguration around a maternal figure. The film’s strength lies in a representation rooted in Asian queer cinema of male relationships. In addition, social class tensions shape the emotions, and grief redraws loyalties. Nothing is didactic. Hiroko Sebu lays down music like a filigree line, almost a hum, while Ryō Hayano’s editing breathes, allowing floating spaces where we sense more than we know
The performances go a long way. Ryohei Suzuki, as Kōsuke, inhabits the glossy surface of a man very concerned with his appearance, revealing an intimate, old wound that professional success cannot fill. Hio Miyazawa, as Ryūta, gives simple gestures a bare gravity: an apologetic smile, a lowered gaze, the way he holds a cup as if apologizing for existing. Yūko Nakamura brings to Kōsuke’s mother a muted, almost ritual presence, expressing the weight of ancestors and the difficulty of being oneself under their eyes.
Staging, Ellipsis, And Restraint
Naoya Ikeda’s cinematography works with hushed interiors where shadow softens color. Skin is filmed up close, never fetishized. The camera glides, stops, moves on, like a breath. A claimed sobriety that rejects pathos. Here, melodrama does not explode; it seeps in. Breaks appear without fanfare, through a cut, through a door closing. The underlying financial dynamic is felt in envelopes on the table and promises of “support.” Little by little, this dynamic throws romantic harmony off balance.
Matsunaga seeks neither exemplarity nor a thesis. He films the power that creeps into love when money circulates badly. In addition, he shows the shame that clings to the skin when one crosses class lines without instructions. He also evokes the fear of being seen as a kept lover or a dependent. In this gray zone, the characters reinvent the words “giver” and “grateful.” They try to inhabit an intimacy that is not a precarious lease.
A Tight Melodrama, Until The Turn
The film moves at an even pace, faithful to its interiors, until the turning point that reshapes it. There is no need to say more, except that it involves loss and opens another axis: the bond between Kōsuke and Ryūta’s mother, a figure of frugal, dignified parenthood, giving gratitude an almost liturgical breadth. Matsunaga then creates another, unexpected pair, where gratitude becomes the shared language. The melodrama is fully embraced, but without heaviness. Indeed, the tear is born of a hand resting on a bowl. In addition, it comes from a held breath. Finally, it appears from a silence that lasts just a little longer than usual.
Egoist comes from a semi-autobiographical book by Makoto Takayama, where intimate experience serves as a compass. Kyōko Inukai and Daishi Matsunaga turn it into a screenplay that preserves the modesty of the situations and the restraint of the confessions. The adaptation works through ellipsis. Kōsuke’s past surfaces in fragments—an adolescence marked by absence, a departure from the countryside—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 refused to say the essential.
The 120-minute runtime 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, is an ironic riddle: who is it about? The one who gives too much? The one who accepts? Or the ego wounded by unequal positions? The moral remains open, in the manner of stories that care for the viewer.
Japan Context: Queer Representation, Scenes, And Countershots
In Japan, LGBTQ+ stories often move at a hushed pace. Mainstream production remains stingy with complex queer characters. In recent years, festivals and Asian gay cinema have served as valuable relay points. Egoist unfolds there naturally: world premiere in October 2022 at the Tokyo International Film Festival, circulation through programs dedicated to diversity, then occasional screenings in events in France, among others, where the film finds an attentive echo. This trajectory is not trivial: it speaks to the persistence of an ecosystem in which discovery comes through curious venues and informed audiences.
This reception accompanies a broader shift. Filmmakers and writers are multiplying non-schematic portraits, far from caricature. Daishi Matsunaga, already attentive to these questions, rejects a bird’s-eye view. He chooses proximity: gestures, utensils, exchanges of money that erase neither desire nor empathy. In this closeness, Japanese cinema deploys an ethic of restraint. Thus, it does not hide pain. However, it keeps pain from becoming spectacle.
From Page To Screen: An Assumed Lineage
One reads Egoist by Makoto Takayama as a story of thwarted coming-of-age. The writing moves through brief scenes, through memories that settle in. The film takes up that movement, but gives it the materiality of spaces and the vulnerability of faces. Naoya Ikeda’s cinematography sharpens textures, Ryō Hayano’s editing creates the breaths that characterize the adaptation, Hiroko Sebu’s music refrains from commentary. One recognizes the virtue of teamwork: nothing hogs the spotlight, everything contributes to the same tone.
Cast: A Rare Alchemy
A word about Ryohei Suzuki and Hio Miyazawa. Together, they sketch the oscillation of a romance searching for its balance point. Suzuki establishes the discipline of an orderly man whose success offers poor protection against dread. Miyazawa, for his part, gives quiet sacrifice an intensity without pathos; he never layers on distress, he lets it emerge. In a second circle, Yūko Nakamura and Sawako Agawa, with parenthood expressed in the plural, anchor the film in a sensitive realism where mothers save no one, but learn how to hold on.
Release And Circulation: From Japan To France
Shot and produced in Japan, Egoist had a domestic release in 2023. In France, Art House is handling the distribution, with a theatrical release set for October 8, 2025. The rollout is planned in the arthouse circuit. It is supported by festival networks. In addition, the independent cinema community is backing it as well. The French-subtitled trailer immediately sets the film’s line: looks, skin, breath, few words, and that inner movement that leads from attraction to attachment, then to what resists it.
An Ethic Of Attention
You leave Egoist thinking about the words left unsaid, the choices not made. The film makes no promise of repair. Instead, it pays sharper attention to the uses of money. In addition, it looks at the blind spots of class. It also pays attention to the tiny rituals that make it possible to live with loss. At a time when so many queer stories are asked to explain, persuade, and reassure, Matsunaga offers another path: that of a tight melodrama, expansive yet discreet, speaking to us in a low voice and, long afterward, still warming our hands.
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