Since discovering the film after first looking into Kurosawa's filmography I've thought The Bad Sleep Well was an obtuse name for a movie. It's strangely phrased and bluntly direct, more of an observational statement than a descriptive title. Translating each word of the Japanese title — warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru — individually gives us the very clunky "bad guy degree sleep well", pretty close to the title we got. The notable exclusion is this idea of "degree". "The Bad Sleep Well" suggests a causational binary but the original Japanese would suggest something of a correlative relationship, more "the degree to which you are a bad guy positively influences how well you sleep". This is why a popular alternative title is some variation of "The Worse they are, the Better they Sleep". There is still some nuance missing here though. "Yatsu" literally translates to "guy" but carries a familiar, even derogatory connotation. "Nemuru" literally translates as "to sleep" but is often used in metaphor as "to die". So a cutting double entendre is lost in translation: Evil, unrespectable people may be able to live with themselves, but they make great targets for revenge. Therefore Akira Kurosawa Info forum users Ugetsu and Kili (who's conversation was my source for this etymological dicussion) argue that the most accurate title would be "The Meaner the Bastard, the Better he Sleeps, but Maybe With the Fishes" — Ugetsu admits this probably wouldn't make it past the marketing people.
This was a very solid Kurosawa film. Like Throne of Blood before it, Bad takes inspiration from a Shakespeare story but narrows the text down to a single, focused idea. Throne of Blood adapts Macbeth as an ice cold meditation on determinism, The Bad Sleep Well adapts Hamlet as a cutting critic of bureaucratic systems.
Evil is selfish and hierarchical, it's a statement that you live a fundamentally more important existence unbound to the moral considerations of lesser men. Evil people will always fail though. They have to. They'll always be victimized by the same system they willingly participated in. Someone will always have a greater "degree" of evil, someone will always be able to sleep better.
The Bad Sleep Well can suffer from an overly expository script and a slightly stretched runtime. With tighter dialogue and a bit of trimming this could've gone down as one of my favourite Kurosawa films. What we have now is a thought provoking, if unpolished film with a very strange title.
Kili and Ugetsu's forum posts: https://akirakurosawa.info/forums/topic/the-bad-sleep-well-why-do-they-sleep-so-well/
Since discovering the film after first looking into Kurosawa's filmography I've thought The Bad Sleep Well was an obtuse name for a movie. It's strangely phrased and bluntly direct, more of an observational statement than a descriptive title. Translating each word of the Japanese title — warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru — individually gives us the very clunky "bad guy degree sleep well", pretty close to the title we got. The notable exclusion is this idea of "degree". "The Bad Sleep Well" suggests a causational binary but the original Japanese would suggest something of a correlative relationship, more "the degree to which you are a bad guy positively influences how well you sleep". This is why a popular alternative title is some variation of "The Worse they are, the Better they Sleep". There is still some nuance missing here though. "Yatsu" literally translates to "guy" but carries a familiar, even derogatory connotation. "Nemuru" literally translates as "to sleep" but is often used in metaphor as "to die". So a cutting double entendre is lost in translation: Evil, unrespectable people may be able to live with themselves, but they make great targets for revenge. Therefore Akira Kurosawa Info forum users Ugetsu and Kili (who's conversation was my source for this etymological dicussion) argue that the most accurate title would be "The Meaner the Bastard, the Better he Sleeps, but Maybe With the Fishes" — Ugetsu admits this probably wouldn't make it past the marketing people.
This was a very solid Kurosawa film. Like Throne of Blood before it, Bad takes inspiration from a Shakespeare story but narrows the text down to a single, focused idea. Throne of Blood adapts Macbeth as an ice cold meditation on determinism, The Bad Sleep Well adapts Hamlet as a cutting critic of bureaucratic systems.
Evil is selfish and hierarchical, it's a statement that you live a fundamentally more important existence unbound to the moral considerations of lesser men. Evil people will always fail though. They have to. They'll always be victimized by the same system they willingly participated in. Someone will always have a greater "degree" of evil, someone will always be able to sleep better.
The Bad Sleep Well can suffer from an overly expository script and a slightly stretched runtime. With tighter dialogue and a bit of trimming this could've gone down as one of my favourite Kurosawa films. What we have now is a thought provoking, if unpolished film with a very strange title.
Kili and Ugetsu's forum posts: https://akirakurosawa.info/forums/topic/the-bad-sleep-well-why-do-they-sleep-so-well/
