Three Japanese Books Went to Toronto. Only One Was Read Properly.

I was not in Toronto. I read Toronto from a mini-theatre in Shibuya between the matinee and the seven o'clock, the way I have read every autumn festival for fifteen years, and this year the wire kept bringing me the same thing in three different wrappers: a Japanese book, a famous director, a room in Canada, and a reviewer trying to be polite. Three adaptations of Japanese writing premiered at TIFF this week. Only one of them, by the accounts we carried, was read properly before it was filmed.

Start with the one everybody wanted to love. Hirokazu Kore-eda took on Tatsuki Fujimoto's Look Back, the 2021 manga about two girls who draw, and ScreenAnarchy's headline is the kind you write with a heavy hand: Kore-eda struggles to bring the acclaimed manga to life. The review calls the film thoughtful, which is the word critics use for Kore-eda when they are not moved. I have not seen it. What I know is that Look Back is 140 pages about the physical act of drawing, and Kore-eda's gift has always been for people who do not say what they mean, not for hands. This may be a case of the right director and the wrong book.

Then the one nobody expected. Wayne Wang, who has not made a film since 2019, came to Toronto with Diary of a Mad Old Man, from Tanizaki's 1961 novel, and told ScreenAnarchy it may be his last. The Playlist's review is measured, attempts is the verb in the headline, but the casting is the story. Fan Bingbing plays a Chinese caregiver drawn into the fixation of a stroke-paralysed Japanese widower, and she told Variety that cinema should be able to cross borders. Tanizaki wrote the book about an old man's desire for his daughter-in-law. Wang has made the object of desire a foreigner, in a language the old man half-understands. That is not an update. That is a reading. It goes to Busan next, which is where it belongs.

And the one that should not have been made, if you believe The Film Stage, which called Takashi Miike's Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo a lazy, insipid addition to an unlikely franchise. The book here is Abel Ferrara's 1992 film, which is a kind of scripture for a certain kind of man, and Miike was hired, the review says, because on paper it makes perfect sense. It does. Miike has made a hundred and ten films and at least twenty of them are about a policeman who is worse than the criminals. The problem with hiring a man to do the thing he already does is that he already did it. Lazy is a hard word. I suspect it is the right one, and I suspect Miike would shrug.

So the count is one adaptation that read its source and changed it on purpose, one that read it and could not translate it, and one that did not need a source at all. That is a normal week in Asian cinema abroad, and it is exactly why the reviews matter more than the red carpet: the pattern only shows when you read all three.

Around the three books, Toronto was kinder to the films that started from life rather than from paper. Edmund Yeo's The Age of Goodbyes, from Li Zi Shu's Malaysian Chinese novel, opens with a family curse of early death, and Variety let Yeo say the sentence I will keep: ordinary people living inside history. Peter Chan's The Road Not Taken, an Alzheimer's drama, took its directing motto from a dementia care home in Chengdu that Chan visited while researching. Neither is a Japanese story, and both are the kind of Asian film Toronto has always been good at receiving: a family, a country, a slow catastrophe.

Hong Sang-soo, meanwhile, made another Hong Sang-soo film, and Slant's review of The Day She Returns describes the whole setup in one sentence: an actress sits down for a series of interviews on the press day for her new film. That is the film. He has now made a movie about the thing that happens to a movie after it is finished, and the review says he mines truths from a facade of honesty, which is either a compliment or a description of a press day. Both, I think.

San Sebastián opened on Friday and the first Asian film through the door was a small one. Micropsia, Diego Lerer's desk in Buenos Aires, reviewed Lu Po-shun's Will You Still Be My Friend, a Taiwan-Singapore coming-of-age film in New Directors about a village land dispute that strains two teenage boys, and called it delicate. New Directors is where Taiwanese cinema has been quietly arriving for a decade, and Lerer is the critic who notices. Lav Diaz, at the other end of the scale, is at four hours again with Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors, on the Spanish colonial horrors of the Philippines, which Sight and Sound wrote up this week. Diaz does not adapt books. He adapts the country.

One more thing from Toronto, and it is not about a film. The Film Verdict wrote that TIFF 2026 navigates an identity crisis: the people's festival has become the businesspeople's festival, and the new market dominated the conversation. From Shibuya that reads as a warning for Busan, which announced this week that Zhang Yimou will chair the competition jury and that Alfonso Cuarón will make his first visit to Korea. Busan has always been the festival where the films are watched by people who paid for the ticket. I hope it stays that way. Wayne Wang's mad old man is going there, and he deserves an audience that reads.

The image that stayed this week is not from any of the films. It is Fan Bingbing's sentence, cinema should be able to cross borders, said about a Chinese woman playing a caregiver to a Japanese man in a book from 1961, at a festival in Canada, reviewed in English, read in Tokyo. It already did. Somebody should tell the festivals.