ABSTRACT
In the 2003 Hollywood hit Lost in Translation, Tokyo is the backdrop for a story about two Americans as lost in a foreign culture as they are in their lives back home. Strangers when they first meet as travelers in the same hotel, the two connect over shared insomnia and the mutual recognition of anomie in the other. Japan-a place neither wanted to visit and in which neither is particularly interested-is utterly strange, yet it is a strangeness that, when ventured into together, inspires intimacy between the two. The storyline of Lost in Translation is one of being oddly in place while displaced from home and culture. Director Sofia Coppola shoots scene and after scene of a searingly beautiful Tokyo that, unreadable by the Americans, mystifies and amuses them. It is as strangers “lost in translation” that the audience, too, is positioned to view Japan: a place signifying displacement-a not altogether uncomfortable state, as the story tells us. In this, Japan is treated less literally than metaphorically-a signifier of foreignness about which the Americans remain uncomprehending.
