Movie fans in Japan are accustomed to waiting months, sometimes years, for new releases to make it over here. It doesn’t normally take four decades. Such was the case with Paul Schrader’s “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters,” a 1985 biopic of one of Japan’s most celebrated, and certainly most controversial, writers.

“I guess I knew that this moment would come,” said Schrader, speaking to a packed auditorium at the movie’s Japan premiere at Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) in late October. “I just didn’t know whether I would be alive to see it.”

He certainly didn’t need to worry about pulling a crowd. “Mishima” garnered more buzz than anything else at this year’s festival. Tickets sold out in under 15 minutes. (In response to overwhelming demand, TIFF is organizing two additional screenings of the film this weekend.)

Forty years ago, Schrader’s film had been a wild outlier in the landscape of American cinema: a multilayered, visually dazzling biography interrogating the life, work and mythos of a figure still unfamiliar to many Western viewers, shot entirely in Japanese at Toho Studios in Tokyo.

It was all the more remarkable for being made at a time when Japan was still reckoning with the messy legacy of the film’s subject. Yukio Mishima was a flamboyant, cosmopolitan bisexual and one-time contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was also an ultranationalist ideologue who died by ritual suicide in 1970, after trying to stage a coup at a military base in Tokyo.

Speaking the