Bothering People in Japanese

I’ve watched Lost in Translation way too many times to keep count. There’s something about that film that never gets old—Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Tokyo at night, the feeling of being alone in a crowd. I watched it three times back-to-back on a train once and would happily do it again.

Bill was on Graham Norton recently talking about his Japanese dictionary. Not for any practical reason, but because he likes learning random phrases he can drop into conversations just to confuse people. It’s so perfectly him—the idea of learning language as pure mischief, treating Japanese like it’s a party trick. He’s learning it the way you’d learn sleight of hand, just to watch someone’s face when you do the unexpected thing.

Most people learn language with purpose: travel, work, seeming cultured. Bill just wants the weird stuff, the phrases nobody expects an American actor to know. He mentioned there was one particular phrase that had really gotten stuck with him, something that kept coming back to him. I wish he’d finished that part because I’m genuinely curious what it was—some random sentence that probably didn’t make sense to anyone but appealed to him anyway.