Cinema abounds with tales of imposters and con artists, but some of the most interesting stories are the ones where people get wise to a deception and decide to go along with it anyway. In "His Lost Name," a young drifter arrives in a rural backwater under a fake identity, only to get sucked into a relationship with someone who needs the lie even more than he does.
When aging carpenter Tetsuro (Kaoru Kobayashi) finds a young man (Yuya Yagira) unconscious by a riverside, with a discarded bouquet floating nearby, he takes the stranger home and nurses him back to health. The new arrival gives his name as Shinichi but is otherwise vague about his origins, saying only that he came from Tokyo and is revisiting the area to do "a little soul-searching." Yet his evasiveness is matched by the older man's eagerness for him to stay.
Tetsu takes him on as an apprentice at his furniture workshop, where the other staff give him a warm welcome, apparently unfazed by the fact that "Shinichi" has all the social graces of a serial killer worrying that people are about to find the corpses buried in his garden. When a local policeman comes calling, he stiffens; when a co-worker tries to take his photo, he breaks his phone.