Hodo.

In my Kurosawa festival, I’ve gotten to The Bad Sleep Well, 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…

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