Lost In Translation

So about a month ago I responded to this add on Craig’s List. A woman was looking for someone to run lines with. I responded for the hell of it and got a phone call about an hour later. Her Name is Eriko and we chatted for a bit. She’s from Japan and her English is decent, but she needs time to process what you’re saying so it is best to speak slow…not an easy job for someone with a machine gun mouth. I’m not as bad as a Scorsese or the guy from the Micro Machine adds, but I’m pretty rapid fire.

So we finish our conversation and she asks me to call her back on Sunday, I call back, get nothing but a busy signal for the few times I try and give up. Move on.

This afternoon I get a phone call from her to ask if I could meet for coffee and see if I, "can be of use to her". So I go to Starbucks to meet her and she’s pretty damned stunning. We are talking for a few minutes and I can see that there is a bit of a communications problem. My assignment: Help her work through a couple of questions she has to Ask Halle Berry for some interview an the local Japanese station. She has to get to another meeting, but wants to meet later this evening to go over them.

She callsa little while later to say her meeting is running late and will call me back. I take this as the Japanese polite thing where they can’t tell you “Thanks, but no thanks”. Whatever, I’ve got movies to watch.

Around 9:30 I get a call from her and she asks for some help on a question she needs to ask Ms. Berry. So I am trying to explain to her that the question she is asking does not sound polite and needs some rephrasing, but she keeps telling me that I did not understand what she wanted.

Here’s the question she wrote:

“I read when you moved to Los Angeles you lived in a shelter, what were you thinking?”

Now I understood what she was trying to ask. She wanted to know what was going on in Halle’s head as she was experiencing the situation of living in a shelter. Not, “You idiot, why would you stay in a shelter?” But my attempts to explain this just frustrated her. She kept saying, “I’m from Japan.” Yeah, honey, got it, no road map needed. I worked on talking slow and carefully explained that the way she had phrased it was rude. Rudeness is something the Japanese understand. They cut off fingers and jump off rooftops because of the whole respect thing, so rude should be right up her ally.

So finally she says that she would really like to work with me and when a script comes in, she’ll give me a call so I can help her learn her lines and “explain” what is going on. This situation though needs someone who will simply phrase the question and that’ll be it. No problem. I got a free coffee out of it and hung out with a hot Japanese girl for a bit. I wasn’t doing anything important and there were worse things I could have done with my time.

On a whim I decide to look her up on line and see what results I get. Come to find out this chic was a fucking superstar in Japan who has come to America to make it big. She was the Britney Spears of Japan and was in a ton of television and even had a cartoon about her.

So now three things run through my brain. First, I bet almost every teenage guy in Japan would have castrated himself to sit where I sat today. Second. I’m not sure anymore if her issue was a language barrier or much like Ms. Spears, the poor thing just ain’t that bright. The third and one I find most noggin numbing, maybe she really did want to know what the hell was Halle thinking about staying in a shelter. There are a ton of decent hotels around after all.

The English-speaking world may never know.