Koffee & Kpop

Back in 2018, fresh off a break-up, I heard of the anime film “The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl” and upon finding no one interested in going to watch it with me, turned watching it into a date night with myself. I remember it was screening at the local artsy theater in town that I had not gone to, being more interested in books than obscure films, and for only two days. Surely, I thought, it must be special if it’s only here for two days and then disappears without a trace. It must be magical! And so that is how it happened that I took myself on a date to watch the film, “The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl” before stopping by Ben and Jerry’s to treat myself to a scoop of ice cream (I can’t remember what flavor, but I remember I asked for it in a waffle cone because even though it puts added pressure on you to eat the ice cream before it melts all stickily down your hand, ice cream served in a waffle cone tastes better than ice cream served in a cup).

I thoroughly enjoyed the film and its style. I’ve come to learn that the director, Masaaki Yuasa, has a very unique style that permeates all of their films. The titular figure, whose name I don’t recall us ever knowing, reminded me a bit of myself, walking through that lone night in search of alcohol. Yes, I admit I was coming out of my Manic Pixie Dream Girl stage at that point in my life. I filed it away in my brain as a Film I Very Much Liked and promptly forgot about it over the years.

Somehow, years later, upon finding that it was actually a book prior to being a film, and books being almost always better than their films, I found a used copy on Amazon and asked my mother to buy it for me, as I was (and still am) living in Korea and the book could not be purchased and shipped to Korea.

It arrived in a terrible state. I’m not sure what sorts of hell it had been through, but the dust jacket was in a positively miserable state. There was a brown sticky stain along the edge, and black imprints of words along the back cover as if someone had used the book as a table to stamp something. Though I could not tell at first, the bottom of the book was a little water stained, as if it had briefly jumped out of someone’s hands in the bath and taken a quick dip among the bubbles. Even though I have always been a dust-jacket-on kind of book collector, I couldn’t stand the look of it and threw it immediately into the trash, leaving only the plain red water stained hardcover and gilded title adorning the spine to line my book shelf.

And so, fellow readers, there it sat for six months. I was actively avoiding a book club book when my eyes landed upon the cover and I pondered what the last physical book I read was (that was “A Thousand Blues”). Picking up “The Night is Short, Walk On Girl,” I did that awkward thing we book readers always do but no one likes to admit and opened it up to a random page and buried my nose in it. It smelled a little musty, but there was a hint of something sweet, like orange blossom. It was pleasant in the way that used book smells are always pleasant. I’ll just read a few pages, I thought, to see if it’s something to move up on my to-be-read list.

I read the first whole chapter that night, as one does. It brought back many good memories of watching the film by myself in a dark, eerily empty theater, and the memories of my life back in 2018 when I was going through so much change, unaware that an even bigger change would happen the very next year that would lead me to a foreign shore that I would go on to call my home for on-going five years. I was her, in search of a never-ending night of controlled debauchery, of an endless party that only adults could throw and take part in, even though at that time, I was very much an “adult” as far as the rest of the society would say.

Over the course of a week, in which I juggled getting to know new students and putting both English and Korean names to faces, and learning how to teach from new textbooks, I’d read the book in spurts, feeling a matter of all sorts of ways. You see, I can’t say that I enjoyed the book. It’s not that I hated the book or didn’t enjoy it. I quite liked the style of the book, the oddness of the translation that so perfectly captured the overall weirdness of the book, but I hated the over-arching premise.

Romantic comedies are not my thing and yet, how was it that I came to read this strange romantic comedy? Having grown up when I did, and with piercings and brightly colored hair to boot, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope was downright annoying. There was little substance to the girl other than her openness, her void, her childishness. She was no adult, merely a one-dimensional character that the other character could project his selfish wants and desires onto.

And he was nothing but a slimeball.

Maybe if I had read the book when I was in my early 20s, I would have found his character intriguing or even cute, but as an adult twice that age, I rolled my eyes quite a bit whenever it was his turn to talk. Get over yourself, I’d think. You know nothing about her beyond the back of her head. You’re a loser who is literally putting her on a pedestal, in a castle, and rather than going up and knocking on the door and inviting her for tea, you yourself lament how you’re just filling in the moat out front. I don’t like that one bit.

Had I not watched and enjoyed the film, I would have stopped reading after the first chapter. What a sick bore. The titular girl wasn’t even a two-dimensional character—she was merely an outline the boy was coloring in with his own beliefs, a shadow we the readers were following along, with hints of personhood and autonomy but nothing much, really, to hold onto.

It might surprise you to hear that I do plan on reading more of this writer/translator duo, because I did very much enjoy the writing style, so much so that I have employed it (perhaps very badly) in writing this review. But this book is one of those rare times when the movie is, alas, better than the book.

As for what the title means to me, I’m still trying to figure that out. But boys like the one in the book should very much be kicked down the road like the wayside pebble they are.