When Japanese director Koji Fukada received the Tokyo International Film Festival’s Akira Kurosawa Award at the age of 42 in 2022, he bashfully suggested that the career achievement prize might be coming a little too soon. Past recipients had included Steven Spielberg, Yoji Yamada and Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-hsien; and the other honoree that night, with whom he shared a stage, was five-time Oscar winner Alejandro González Iñárritu . Fukada said he would be donating the cash prize that came with the honor to a local organization he had co-founded that provides mental health and legal support to freelance film workers in Japan — and he vowed to keep striving to make good on the faith placed in his talent.

Fukada had already consistently distinguished himself at major film festivals — his breakthrough family comedy Hospitalité won Tokyo’s top prize in 2010, and his harrowing dramatic thriller Harmonium took home the jury prize from Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section in 2016 — but for his latest feature, N agi Notes…