‘The Name’: Ren Komai’s performance raises a multilayered drama

What’s in a name? On one level, it’s how you identify yourself to yourself (as in dorky name, dorky self-image). On another, it’s your social calling card, your link to family, going back generations (or not, if an ancestor decided to exchange one name for another).

The hero of “The Name,” Akihiro Toda’s engaging multilayered drama, has abandoned all that. Living in a crumbling old house in the countryside and working as a laborer at a recycling plant, he is Masao Nakamura (Kanji Tsuda), but, at certain times and places, he goes by other, fake names........

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