In my Kurosawa festival, I’ve gotten to The Bad Sleep Well [Internet Archive], which is astonishingly good, with a riveting performance by Mifune — I can’t believe I’d barely heard of it. (Actually, I can, because it’s the grimmest, bitterest movie he ever made aside from Ran, and it openly attacks the corruption and brutality of corporate life.) But I bring it here for its title, which in Japanese is 悪い奴ほどよく眠る Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru. Now, I don’t actually know Japanese, but I did when I was very young and I’ve read a fair amount about it since (and seen a lot of movies), so I can generally figure out how sentences work; in this case, I know 悪い奴 warui yatsu is ‘bad guys’ and よく眠る yoku nemuru is ‘sleep well.’ But what’s this hodo? My trusty Rose-Innes Vocabulary of Common Japanese Words has the following array of senses:
1) Approximate quantity : about.
2) Quantity ; price ; much.
3) Comparisons of equality : as–as.
4) Neg. comparisons. (example: sore hodo waruku nai not so bad as that)
5) An individual is compared to all the other individuals of the same kind.
6) So–(that).
7) Enough.
8) The–the. (example: ōi hodo ii the more the better)
9) Moderation ; limit.
10) Time. (example: saki-hodo mairimashita he arrived a short time ago)
11) Various. (examples: hodo no ii hito desu he’s a decent person; ii hodo ni aisatsu shite oita I gave a vague answer)
(He has lots of example sentences; I just copied out a few to give an idea of the relevant sense.) This reminds me of the dustman’s dumpling and doesn’t give me much help. Can any Japanese speakers out there explain how the sentence works? If I put “the bad sleep well” into GT, I get 悪人はよく眠る akunin wa yoku nemuru; how does hodo modify the sense?
Also, in the course of the movie I noticed a lovely example of Japanese laconicism: “Kimi… boku… doko e?” [‘you… me… where?’], rendered in the subtitles as “Where are you taking me?” But you have to get that from context.
My Japanese isn’t fluent, but I think hodo here conveys “extent,” i.e., “to the extent that they’re bad guys, to that extent they sleep well.” More idiomatically, perhaps, “the worse the dudes, the better they sleep.” Ooi hodo ii is the same construction (‘to the extent that there’s a lot, to that extent it’s good,” or “the more the better”).
Jon W seems to be exactly right.
Samuel Martin’s Reference Grammar of Japanese treats this use of hodo on pp112f, glossing it “as much as, insofar as”; as it happens, this very expression Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru is one of his example sentences. He renders it “The worst rascals sleep the soundest.”
Several of his other examples of the pattern X hodo Y also get translated along the lines “the more X it is, the more X does Y.”
More idiomatically, perhaps, “the worse the dudes, the better they sleep.”
Exactly. Basically “the more …, the more …” Some more examples:
金持ちほどケチだ。Kanemochi hodo kechi da. The richer people are, the stingier they are.
初心者ほど基本が大事だ。Shoshinsha hodo kihon ga daiji da. The more of a beginner you are, the more important basics are.
下手な人ほど言い訳が多い。Heta na hito hodo iiwake ga ooi. The worse someone is at something, the more excuses they make.
Thanks, all! And the fact that Martin’s Reference Grammar uses it as an example sentence suggests that Kurosawa was using a preexisting saying, which is also valuable information.
Incidentally, I realized today that Yojimbo is basically the same movie (Mifune takes on the yakuza/zaibatsu combo) except it’s set a century earlier and has a happy ending (all the baddies die!).
a preexisting saying
Yes, I wondered if that might be so. A kind of counterpoint to Juvenal’s nemo malus felix (probably also nicked from a proverb); though I think you can rescue the Juvenal one by saying that though (say) a Trump or a Musk may often experience the slaking of their appetites, they lack the equipment to be actually felix (for example, they cannot experience friendship or love.) They probably do sleep well, though. (Once Trump has finished his Truthing for the night, and Musk has had his ketamine.)
Irritating (and vaguely relevant) mistranslation from Naden’s Agolle Kusaal dictionary:
yɛl babigi na bɛ sɔ’ sʋnfʋn ka li kɛ ka o zaansim si’em la
“The more you worry, the more likely you are to have bad dreams”
This is impressionistic guff; the words are actually extracted from
Nwɛnɛ yɛl babigi na bɛ sɔ’ sʋnfʋn ka li kɛ ka o zaansim si’em la
“Like the way that many concerns will arise in a someone’s mind and cause them to dream …”
The verse continues
ala ka li na an nɛ zɔlʋgʋ na pian’ad pian’ayɛɛd.
“thus it will be with a fool about to speak many words.”
(Ecclesiastes 5:3, as all Hatters will have instantly realised.)
This is a long-standing systematic SIL vice which seems to be getting ever worse over time: attempting lexicography while altogether ignoring grammar. Bad show …
[Sorry: I’m currently pissed off about the online SIL Bimoba dictionary, which could have been very useful for my (admittedly somewhat niche) purposes, if it had been done with basic linguistic competence. As it is, it’s deeply frustrating. SIL used to be better than this.]
FWIW, this 2018 post adds an interesting observation about usage. Here’s a quick Google translation:
Thanks very much!
Ketamine is a stimulant; it definitely doesn’t let you sleep and may have replaced Ecstasy from what I hear.
Ketamine is used as a general anaesthetic (my sole actual experience of it.) Admittedly, Eglon will not be using it for any genuine medical purpose.
I vaguely remember seeing this movie, many, many moons ago. And yes, Jon W’s interpretation is correct. I guess the problem is that the ほど comes after the noun rather than the adjective (悪い).
ketamine has been around as a party drug for long enough for “in a k-hole” to be used be people who don’t entirely understand that it’s a drug reference. my sense is that it’s been out-competing MDMA recently because it’s hitting the trifecta of easier to get ahold of, cheaper, and more likely to be what it’s supposed to be. which i think is a pity, because it’s never sounded like a fun ride to me.
I parsed the phrase “the bad sleep well” as referring to a well that serves as a source of bad sleep and was genuinely puzzled about what bad guys have to do with it and where is the well in the Japanese original (expecting something like 悪い睡眠の井). Only after reading through the third comment I realised my silly error.
Ha! I hadn’t realized that could be a garden-path title.