Japanese films targeted at adult men, particularly those made by Toei, often have a dark, heavy, turbulent quality. Japanese has a wonderful, hard-to-translate word for it — dorodoro. Think of slogging across a muddy field at 3 a.m. in the driving rain; or being a middle-aged guy with a troubled past, a dim future and a slim chance at redemption that will come only if you confront the shadowy, dangerous powers that murdered your career.
That, roughly, is the hero's situation in Junji Sakamoto's "Yukizuri no Machi (Strangers in the City)." Based on an eponymous 1992 mystery novel by Tatsuo Shimizu, the story may have a whodunit arc, but the focus is on the dorodoro journey of the hero, Hatano (Toru Nakamura), a former high-school teacher who made the mistake of falling for, marrying and later divorcing one of his students — and has been paying the price for the past 12 years.
At this point, any potential Hollywood remaker is turning the page, since many in the remaker's target audience will see Hatano as a predatory pedophile, undeserving of sympathy — though some might call his case borderline.