Ending Note

 2.21

-in the Japanese game “Infinite Wealth,” Kiryu, the dying protagonist, is encouraged by friends to make what the subtitles refer to as a ‘bucket list;’-- a list of things he wants to do before he dies. The phrase the characters use sounds like the English words ‘ending note;’ this all makes sense because 1) the ‘bucket list’ is (presumably?) a relatively recent concept so importing a phrase for it makes sense but 2) the actual term ‘bucket list’ derives from the colloquial/ vulgar euphemism ‘kick the bucket’ for death which might not translate into Japanese (on several levels).

a) anyway the use of ‘ending note’ (which might refer to a slightly more specific concept than the extremely vague English term ‘bucker list’) seems representative of the increasing prevalence of phrases derived from English in other languages, which was something that I was talking about with a Korean speaker recently. Obviously, here the language is Japanese, but the forces involving importing words from English are presumably at least similar. For what it is worth, one of the characters who is a party to the ‘bucket list’ conversations, Songhee, is of Korean ancestry; she is the head of a Korean criminal organization operating in Japan, the Geomejul, that to my knowledge, has no parallels in the real world at all; she speaks Korean at other points in the story. Her voice is a little odd, I cannot tell if it is some form of a Korean accent; indeed the character is a little odd and I cannot tell how much of it is Japanese stereotypes about Koreans or how much is just her being an odd person/ kinda lazy character who serves a series of convenient, but not especially consistent, purposes in the narrative. 

b) the ‘ending note’ /’bucket list’ is v positive (on levels) in a way that imports from English did not used to be. Ten years ago, I think the repeated use of an English import would have 1) foreshadowed something crappy or 2) (far more likely) served as a sign post that one of the speakers using it was a total piece of shit. Namba introduces the ‘ending note:’ if this was 2010, I would bet all my money that Namba is going to sell everyone out. In 2024, I don’t think he will, but I also am NOT ruling it out. The main thing is that Namba kinda already betrayed everyone (just a little tho) in Kasuga’s first game*** so 1) he IS capable of it but mainly 2) they already used ‘Namba sells everyone out’ so they probably have to come up w a new one and mainly 3) he seems to have learned from/deeply regretted the betrayal so intense personal loyalty is now part of his character (would make betrayal more tragic/unexpected-- so it COULD happen). Also Chirose, in Hawaii seems to be working multiple angles so having two unfaithful party members might be too much/they already have the ‘betrayal from within’ angle covered. Anyway, ten years ago ‘ending note’ would have been an unmissable sign that Namba was going to resume his treacherous ways-- now it seems like a good suggestion from a good guy. 

c) once it is introduced as a concept, the ‘bucket list’ becomes a part of the game-- doing pretty much anything (beating people up, walking around, playing games within the larger game; really almost anything) gets you points of one of three types, when you accumulate enough of a type of a points it will make Kiryu more powerful. Similar systems-- rewards for doing nearly every type of stuff-- have existed in the games for years [in one a ‘shinto priest’ gives you ‘virtue points’]; this both uses the actual concept of the ‘bucket list’ while kind of creating a link between past and current games due to the specifics of how it operates; really a lot of levels of interesting stuff.

***Namba is an ex-nurse who, in the first game, was living as a homeless person so that he could try to get information about his brother, a journalist who had disappeared investigating a counterfitting ring run by the Geomejul. In the course of doing this he saves the life of, and befriends, protagonist Ichiban Kasuga, The existence of the ulterior motive is, in fact, revealed by Songhee-- currently helping Namba with Kiryu’s ‘ending note.’ After Songhee’s reveal, Namba ditches Ichiban’s party, and eventually teams up with some bad guys and even fights Ichiban, because he believes that doing this will help him get to the truth about his brother. HOWEVER, it turns out that the Koreans never hurt his brother, just kept him stashed somewhere where he got married and is happy. So, with this knowledge, Namba resumes being a good guy and seems extra loyal to Ichiban over guilt about selling everyone out. The deal with Songhee’s criminal group is that they have an immense amount of information, so actually, if she had just told Namba that his brother was fine from the get go it would have avoided a series of events that ended with the Geomejul burning down their headquarters. She is still regarded as some kind of criminal mastermind-- and probably actually is, in context, given the various bozos, lunatics, rubes, and over-dressed choir-boys who become gang bosses in the yakuza-verse. 

Anyway, even though it all worked out, Namba and Songhee ended Kasuga’s first game with a couple of fairly legitimate grievances against each other (kidnapped brothers, burned down counterfitting printers, stuff like that); whereas, Seiko, the other returning character, seemed not to get along with Songhee on a personal level, but really didn’t have much to do with her in terms of how their arcs connected in the plot. Now, however, Songhee and Namba are getting along just fine, and the tension is between Songhee and Sieko who are engaged in a catty battle for Kiryu’s attention. This is extremely in keeping with RGG’s portrayal of female characters and it is simply not one of their stronger suites. I think this actually makes the point that using gender stereotypes is, almost by definition a weaker narrative move ‘other thing.’ The catty Songhee-Seiko thing is, by definition, generic whereas if the tension was between Namba and Songhee based on the crappy things they had done to each other in the earlier game, it would have pushed you deeper into the story and showed more of the characters. 

I don’t want to get ahead of myself, or anything, but I mean, I think the conventional wisdom is that if you had an arc where Songhee and Seiko got to be pals based on their shared experiences as females in RGG’s horribly sexist world, that would be kind of cool, right?

Infinite Wealth: 

they teased it for a GAME AND A FUCKING HALF but the Kiryu/Kashiwagi reunion did not disappoint. Just kicked immense ass. Pure genius, really the kind RGG has mostly all to themselves; just these fuckn, intense, raw, intimate feelings about situations that are utterly ridiculous. Like this is two people, who were both a little far fetched initially, and then BOTH faked their deaths (separate incidents nearly ten years apart). And it is SO BITER SWEET. It FEELS bittersweet like some kind fundamentally of mundane situation, just sad, a little pointless, a friend moving out of your life because a job or something perfectly reasonable took them somewhere; a bookstore, coffee shop, bar whatever that was part of your orbit going out of business. But...it’s two video game gangsters (with almost one [loansharking, 0 + first game] money making criminal enterprises between them) who BOTH faked their deaths. 

And then you do this Karaoke/backing up karaoke scene where you can’t control anything-- in a series known for karaoke/backing up karaoke mini games-- it never lets you play, instead the characters just rock out. Pretty poignant, + idk how they execute that well. 

2.22: Western musical vocabulary in Japan: 

I am increasingly impressed w the ‘ending note’ as a use of the English language, particularly given that it is employed by people who, uh, are not actually speaking English. Especially in contrast to ‘bucket list’ [on a lawn chair in a trailer park someone lists the ‘things they wanna do before they kick the bucket’ – presumably a long list since they spent their life in a fucking trailer park], ‘ending note’ calls to mind the idea of ending a peace of music with the right note. A last thing that flows from the earlier things but is just a little bit better, a little bit special, because it is known to be the last. Very pretty. 

The note includes the idea of harmony; the ‘bucket list’ is series of acquisitions made under limited time-- life as one of those gameshows you win by grabbing the most valuable items off the shelves in a supermarket. 

Fuckn ‘bucket list?’ We are getting owned at by the Japanese AT ENGLISH. Call to action, people.

Is interesting to me how interested Japanese seem to be in Western musical vocabulary. Big one to me [there are other ones for people (morons) whose world does not revolve around Takeshi Kitano] is obviously ‘Sonatine’ – which, bc I looked it up, I know is a specific word for a kind of miniature sontata, but I looked it up because it is the name of one of my absolute favorite yakuza movies. And the use of the title, the idea of this little self-contained peace of music, works just wonderfully for the movie. A Japanese guy deploying an English word that most English speakers would never use and probably don’t know. 

Kitanot also uses “Coda”-- a music term-- for the last Outrage movie. 

I am assuming that it was released in Japan as just “Sonatine” or a 1-to-1 Japanese equivalent and that “Sonatine” is NOT a localization, or a title used just for the English release. Normally I do NOT make these assumptions but 1) ‘Sonatine’ is a word that is, again, NEVER used in every day English, unknown to most speakers, and gives no hints that you are about to watch a gangster movie, so it would be odd for the Western marketers to come up with it independently and 2) it is from a sequence of films (the only one that I know of, ever) when the Japanese director (or one of his people) seems to have taken an interest what his films were called in English. After “Sonatine” was “Fire works” which they always let you know was called ‘hana-bi’ in Japanese, even though it is very close to a one-to-one translation-- it was just somehow a thing that you could also call that movie “Hana-bi,” (on the cover?) the cool thing is to call it “hana-bi/fireworks” and it’s the only movie I can think of like that, where the words mean the same thing, but you use both-- and it is acceptable/encouraged to use BOTH the English and original title. And then Kitano did “Brother” where, even when they are speaking English they always use the Japanese “anaki” (this is the reason why “anaki” is, hilariously, probably one of the better known Japanese words by non-speakers-- like if the only word of English anyone knew was ‘consiglierie’ (that the word is Italian seems a minor detail, at this point)) BUT even tho they ALWAYS use ‘anaki’ and a point that the movie makes, actually the THEME OF THE MOVIE, is it conveys something much more involved than the English “brother,” they released the movie as “Brother” in English. Which, if it was not a deliberate examination of the “brother”/ “anaki” concept, and the gaps in the meaning between the two words… they easily could have called it something else altogether for the English release. “Samurai gangster in Los Angles”