The Murakami T-Shirt Book
May. 13th, 2022 07:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingI didn't want to pay actual money for Haruki Murakami's book of essays about t-shirts, so I got it from the library.
Not ten pages in, Murakami talks about how much he loves America, and then he makes a joke about how fat Americans are. I guess, if you don't have the slim and sexually charged body of a preadolescent twelve-year-old girl, you have a weak character and there's something wrong with you.
Like a clown, I was hoping there wouldn't be any of that weird body-shaming pedo shit here, and I guess we're all laughing at how silly I was. Now my money is on Murakami making fun of how "fat" Asian-Americans are (which he does every time he talks about California or Hawaii) before I get halfway through.
I watched Everything Everywhere All at Once, by the way. It's an interesting movie, but it's not for everyone. Specifically, I think it might not be for people who speak enough Chinese to understand what Michelle Yeoh's character is actually saying. She's always calling her daughter "fat," for example. Despite her constantly saying things like "fat daughter" and "fat face," the word "fat" only appears twice in the subtitles: Once to demonstrate what her daughter is upset about, and once at the end of the movie to show that Michelle Yeoh's character loves her daughter but isn't going to back down from calling her fat. If you don't speak Chinese, this means nothing; but, if you do, I imagine that it can be triggering. I have a friend who told me that she couldn't make it past the first fifteen minutes of the movie before walking out in tears.
Another word Michelle Yeoh's character constantly uses is "shenjinbing" (神経病), which literally means "mental illness" but is used by older generations as a slur to mean "crazy" or "stupid." It's like Michelle Yeoh's character is going around the entire movie calling people "retarded," and of course this doesn't get translated in the subtitles.And thank god there are no Black or Hispanic people in the movie for the character to comment on, because the word she uses for "Jewish" is fucking wild.
Idk, there are a lot of male film critics talking about how brilliant Everything Everywhere All at Once is, and there are a lot of women being very quiet. And that's how I feel about the Murakami t-shirt book, namely, that it's probably best not to talk about everything that's going on there.
Not ten pages in, Murakami talks about how much he loves America, and then he makes a joke about how fat Americans are. I guess, if you don't have the slim and sexually charged body of a preadolescent twelve-year-old girl, you have a weak character and there's something wrong with you.
Like a clown, I was hoping there wouldn't be any of that weird body-shaming pedo shit here, and I guess we're all laughing at how silly I was. Now my money is on Murakami making fun of how "fat" Asian-Americans are (which he does every time he talks about California or Hawaii) before I get halfway through.
I watched Everything Everywhere All at Once, by the way. It's an interesting movie, but it's not for everyone. Specifically, I think it might not be for people who speak enough Chinese to understand what Michelle Yeoh's character is actually saying. She's always calling her daughter "fat," for example. Despite her constantly saying things like "fat daughter" and "fat face," the word "fat" only appears twice in the subtitles: Once to demonstrate what her daughter is upset about, and once at the end of the movie to show that Michelle Yeoh's character loves her daughter but isn't going to back down from calling her fat. If you don't speak Chinese, this means nothing; but, if you do, I imagine that it can be triggering. I have a friend who told me that she couldn't make it past the first fifteen minutes of the movie before walking out in tears.
Another word Michelle Yeoh's character constantly uses is "shenjinbing" (神経病), which literally means "mental illness" but is used by older generations as a slur to mean "crazy" or "stupid." It's like Michelle Yeoh's character is going around the entire movie calling people "retarded," and of course this doesn't get translated in the subtitles.
Idk, there are a lot of male film critics talking about how brilliant Everything Everywhere All at Once is, and there are a lot of women being very quiet. And that's how I feel about the Murakami t-shirt book, namely, that it's probably best not to talk about everything that's going on there.
