Jun Ichikawa was a talented Japanese film director who achieved international acclaim with his Tony Takitani (2004), an affecting adaptation of a Haruki Murakami story. Much of his rich, subtle oeuvre still awaits discovery in the West.

Ichikawa began to direct feature films relatively late in life, making his debut, Bu Su (1987), when he was 39. He had already enjoyed a successful career as a maker of television commercials, having founded his own production office in 1983; and he continued to intersperse advertisements with his fiction work. In his features, however, he opted for a slow pace often characterised by Japanese critics, and sometimes by himself, as jimi, meaning “plain” or “unspectacular”.

The quiet surface of Ichikawa’s films concealed an intense engagement with his characters. He dramatised the details of individual lives and feelings, repeatedly focusing on people in difficult circumstances. Often, his characters were disabled or ailing. Tsugumi (1990) was an affecting low-key melodrama describing the tragic life of a physically and intellectually challenged young woman. Dying at a Hospital (1993), widely ranked among Ichikawa’s best films, focused on six terminally ill patients. Gratitude (2006) dealt with the responses of a schoolteacher and one of his pupils to the deaths of their respective fathers.

Elsewhere, Ichikawa dwelt on troubled relationships. Tokyo Lullaby (1997), which won the Director’s Award at the Montreal World Film Festival, was a purposely fragmented, indirect account of the dislocation caused by a failed love affair. Tokyo Marigold (2001) was a non-judgmental chronicle of the year-long romance between a naive woman and a cynical man who has another girlfriend in New York. This film made near abstract patterns of light and colour from the backgrounds of Tokyo and Yokohama at night, showing the visual beauty of which Ichikawa was capable.

Ichikawa’s understated directorial style often seemed indebted to an older tradition of Japanese film-making. He acknowledged a particular debt to Yasujiro Ozu, the master of domestic drama in the prewar and early postwar years. Tokyo Siblings (1995), a story about a brother and sister living together, directly recalled Ozu’s subject matter, while in other films Ichikawa echoed Ozu’s static camera and his use of background images to punctuate the drama.

This self-conscious sense of membership in an artistic tradition made Ichikawa well suited to dramatising the lives of artists. Osaka Story (1999) was about a poor couple working as stand-up comedians in the Osaka manzai tradition. Most notably, The Manga Apartment (1996) depicted a community of manga artists struggling to make ends meet. Ichikawa skilfully created a tone of melancholy nostalgia, celebrating the camaraderie of the early 1960s while never sentimentalising its hardships.

Tony Takitani won Ichikawa the Special Jury Prize at the 2004 Locarno Film Festival. It is possible that he might have won a wider international reputation had he lived. At the time of his death he was editing his latest film, Buy a Suit, scheduled to receive its premiere at the Tokyo International Film Festival.

Jun Ichikawa, film director, was born on November 25, 1948. He died of a brain haemorrhage on September 19, 2008, aged 59