If you’ve ever been in a subway, you’ll know why Exit 8 feels hellish

Genki Kawamura has grown up with gaming. He loves it. “So when Exit 8 came out, I played it almost immediately,” he says. “Then I started to watch streams online.” Gaming right now, he says, is not only about playing the game yourself. “It’s people streaming what they’re playing online and then entire audiences who just watch other people playing games. And what I realised is that there was as much drama and as many stories as there were players and people uploading these videos.” It was a window on humanity.

As a film producer, music video maker and more recently novelist, Kawamura has brought to his creative life a gamer’s focus and drive. Now 47, he continues to work in both the upper reaches of film and music video production, clocking up 42 producer credits; meanwhile, he moonlights writing his own novels and film scripts.

His first film as director was a short called Duality, which was selected for the Cannes Film Festival in 2018. After that came A Hundred Flowers, adapted from his own novel, which won best director at the prestigious San Sebastian Film Festival in 2022. His most recent film, Exit 8, was snapped up by US distributor Neon after it was given a buzzy midnight slot at Cannes last year. Plus, he still does his day job. He’s a one-man powerhouse.

Kawamura’s first novel, If Cats Disappeared from the World, was first published in Japan in 2012 and went on to sell 3 million copies worldwide. Its founding idea was elegantly simple: if a dying man is offered an extra day of life in exchange for something that exists in the world, what would he be prepared to sacrifice? Mobile phones: pfft, gone. Movies: easy. But cats. Is he prepared to lose his beloved moggy?

For Exit 8, he wrote the novel and script (co-devised with Kentaro Hirase) at the same time. The film is a kind of psychological chiller, recasting what was a straightforward “walking game”, in which a single player aims to get out of a labyrinthine subway, as an existential drama. In every medium, his core subject is what it means to be human. “Rather than disaster movies or monster movies, I tend to gravitate more towards exploring memories, guilt, regret – things that we carry with us every day,” Kawamura says.

Within the game, the protagonist has to look for “anomalies”; if something along the passage has subtly changed, it is imperative to turn back. The online players he watched repeatedly missed these signs. “It reminded me of Dante’s Divine Comedy and the journey through Purgatory,” Kawamura says. “It almost felt like all this human sin that we carry … manifested itself in this white corridor. Some people would get angry with the anomalies right away. Other people had a lot more resilience to the different tricks the game was playing on them.”

The film’s protagonist, played by J-pop star Kazunari Ninomiya, fights rising panic while trying to be methodical. While he remains nameless, he feels like a character. We have seen him going to work on the subway, where everyone is determined to ignore the angry man shouting at a woman to stop her baby from crying. We see him walking to his exit when his phone rings; his partner has just discovered she is pregnant and is in a hospital, trying to decide what to do.

And then we are lost with him in a Möbius strip of gleaming passages, occasionally encountering eerie strangers. At one point in the film, he wonders if he is actually dead. “Maybe the characters are indeed dead,” says Kawamura enigmatically. “And just waiting to be judged.”

A Hundred Flowers, which was published as a novel in English just last year, is ostensibly a very different kind of piece. Izumi, a music producer like its author, is forced to face the fact his mother, Yuriko, is sliding into dementia; after he has found a safe home for her, he sets about clearing the flat where they once lived. Son and mother are devoted to each other, but there is a silence at the centre of their relationship. When Izumi was 12, Yuriko disappeared, walking out one morning and leaving him to fend for himself. She had found a lover. When she returned, they never spoke of it again. She did, however, keep a diary.

Yuriko’s story is essentially that of Kawamura’s own grandmother, who left her three children – one of them his mother – without warning. Their father was long dead. “Talking to my grandmother about her different memories, we kind of opened up this secret door into that blank few years,” Kawamura says. In her last flush of awareness, she happily discussed her memories of the time that had for so long been unmentionable. “I almost felt like I witnessed this final moment of a memory. Because of her dementia, it felt like a flower about to wither.”

To abandon one’s children on an erotic whim seems so shocking as to be unforgivable, but if Kawamura was ever angry about it, he has left that behind. “When the novel was released originally, we got fan letters that said,‘Wow, this is very similar to my experience,’” he says. “What that told me is that all these families have things that they really can’t say to each other or even express externally, so those events exist only within our memories. I’m very fascinated by what happens in the human mind, and I was really interested in this idea of dementia because then I think the memories get mixed and happiness and guilt can co-exist.”

He has also adapted his novels Million Dollar Man and April Come She Will as movie scripts, but did not direct them himself. Why does he like using multiple platforms? “I like to think of things that actually can’t be expressed through the medium of film: to explore what is within the characters’ minds, what is happening with their inner monologue and voices, in addition to shining a light on more of the characters’ backgrounds,” he says. He thinks of the novel and film of Exit 8 as complementary twins. “In the film, the characters don’t have much dialogue, so I think there is a question about these characters’ past lives. How do they end up here?”

His next dual project – The Horse and I, due out later this year – takes the true story of a woman who embezzled hundreds of millions of dollars and spent all the money on horses, to become another reflection on the grinding difficulties of communicating. The thief does not speak; she and the horse connect through a shared rhythm, equine trotting matched to her singing in the saddle. The horsewoman, he says, “has somehow lost faith in words, so she went for exploring this form of non-verbal communication with horses”.

Communication – and its failures – is what interests him most right now. For a gamer, he has a remarkable scepticism over the way we use our phones. “I take the subway to work every day and I see everyone around me on their smartphones, so indulged they wouldn’t notice a crying baby on the seat.” It is a selfish individualism, he says, that has us in its collective grip. “I think we see a lot of these anomalies around us. And we continue to move on.”

Exit 8 is screening now. Genki Kawamura is a guest of the Melbourne Writers Festival, May 7 to 10. The Age is a festival partner.

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