With his bald pate and bad posture, 74-year-old Susumu Ichikawa (Renji Ishibashi) looks like a typical retiree, diligently taking out the trash each morning and slurping his wife’s shijimi clam miso soup at the breakfast table. But when night falls, he dons a black fedora, trench coat and tinted glasses, and roams the few remaining quarters of Tokyo where it still feels like the 1960s.

Susumu is actually an unsuccessful author, whose work has transitioned from literary to overliteral. Writing under the pen name Reiji Omae, he has developed a hard-boiled style in which every detail is meticulously noted in staccato prose. The twist is that he isn’t imagining the crimes he writes about: He appears to be perpetrating them.

At his nocturnal hangout spots, he drinks and smokes the night away in the company of his own femme fatale, retired stage actress Hikaru (Kaori Momoi), and has cryptic exchanges with a former public prosecutor, Ishida (Ittoku Kishibe). Susumu is happy for people to believe that he’s a legendary hitman, but complications arise when a rival assassin gets on his tail, while his wife (Michiyo Okusu) starts suspecting he’s having an affair.