HERE is an article in which the author responds to the whitewashing criticism.Īnd here’s the trailer for the movie.Publisher: Ace – Berkley Publishing Group The movie though has been accused of ‘whitewashing’ the characters as the assassins are no longer Japanese but cast people as diverse as Brad Pitt, Sandra Bullock, Michael Shannon, Brian Tyree Henry, Joey King, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Andrew Koji, Zazie Beetz, Karen Fukuhara, Hiroyuki Sanada, Masi Oka, Logan Lerman and Bad Bunny.
The novel (which translated directly from Japanese as ‘Maria Beetle’) was already seen as departure from the norm in Japan: bigger, bolder, more action-packed – although I struggle to understand how anyone who has watched Manga would find any of those attributes surprising. Some of the publicity around the movie makes me wonder about that. I’m hoping that ‘Bullet Train’ will, as well as being a decent thriller, give me that sense of having seen through foreign eyes. The differences become more pronounced when we move to Spain for ‘The Invisible Guardian’ but one of the biggest shifts is when we move to Japan for ‘The Devotion Of Suspect X’ or ‘Malice’ where nothing works the way I’m used to. To me, the differences between Northern European cultures are relatively small whether it’s something Swedish, like ‘ An Elderly Lady Up To No Good’ or German like ‘Blue Night’.
When something starts off in another language the cultural differences are even more apparent. Even though they’re all written in English, I think the cultural differences between the US and the UK and between now and the 1920s stand out when I read contemporary crime fiction or golden age mysteries. Crime fiction is a genre that depends on a shared understanding between writer and reader of the social context that provides motives for murder and the behaviours and attitudes that flag whether someone might be lying or hiding something. I get a buzz out of reading crime fiction originally written in a language other than English.
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