Huckleberry Finn's Bread and Bookshelves (Spoiler-filled thoughts on the movie 'American Fiction')

This contains spoilers for the movie 'American Fiction'.

【Synopsis】
A comedy-drama that satirically depicts the publishing industry and how works by Black authors are treated, through the story of Monk, a Black novelist who is told his work 'isn't Black enough.' In a fit of frustration, he writes a stereotypical 'Black' novel as a joke, which unexpectedly becomes a bestseller and brings him fame he never wanted.

There was a funny scene where Monk, the novelist, sees his book in the 'Black Literature' section at a bookstore, complains to the clerk, 'Isn't it weird to put my novel here!?', and tries to move it to a different shelf himself. I wonder if a 'Black Literature' bookshelf actually exists in America... The clerk said something like, 'It's a chain store, so I can't help it.'

I wonder if it's a chain store with rules that make it hard for individual staff to rearrange things. There are chain stores where staff or individual locations can reorganize authors. I think the customer was just being difficult, honestly.

Even in Japan, I think bookstore shelf classifications like 'Light Novels' or 'Romance Novels' are hard to categorize. When I worked part-time at a small local bookstore in my teens, mobile phone romance novels like 'Koizora' were at their peak. However, I remember one time when a popular author who usually wrote 'romance novels' suddenly started writing only novels about 'cats' that weren't romance at all, and the 'Romance Novel' shelf temporarily descended into chaos. I love authors who constantly change their style, but they are hard for bookstores to handle. I wonder what that romance novelist is doing now.

Monk, an unsuccessful novelist, hates having stereotypes used against him. He tells an acquaintance he fought with, 'You only write novels that are sold at airports,' and then goes to the airport to return to his hometown. Scenes like that are very entertaining, but the novel he wrote in a fit of rage, which is packed with Black stereotypes, sells like crazy and even becomes a candidate for a literary award.

After that, Monk ends up being cast as a 'bad boy' author who just got out of prison, and he faces various struggles. There is a hilarious scene where he shows up to meet film industry people in a simple T-shirt, and the publisher tells him, 'I told you to come dressed in street style!! Are you Sesame Street!!' The actor Jeffrey Wright, who plays the protagonist Monk, has so many scenes where he holds his head in his hands and shrinks into himself, but he's so cute that you have to see it. I love Jeffrey Wright!! The more movies I watch, the more actors I grow to love.

The original work for 'American Fiction' is 'Erasure' by Percival Everett. I haven't read 'Erasure' yet, but I read his 'James' first and it was incredibly interesting. 'James' is also based on Mark Twain's novel 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.' I grew up without reading foreign literature, but Yoshihiko Kihara's translation was excellent.

'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' is an adventure story set in the 19th-century American South, where a boy named Huck, who hates being tied down, travels down the Mississippi River with an escaped slave named Jim. After having adventures with his friend Tom Sawyer and getting a large sum of money, Huck was taken in by a widow and was living a boring life. But through various turns of events, he ends up traveling down the Mississippi River on a raft with the escaped slave Jim.
I didn't know that Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were written by the same author. Also, I thought Tom Sawyer was a real person. That's how little I've read the book. Also, rather than an adventure, it feels more like a true story. The adults who appear are quite trashy. Huck's father is the trashiest of the trash, which is amazing. Also, I was taken aback when Huck brazenly killed a pig and faked his own death with its blood. He's quite a bad boy, or rather... it was beyond my imagination. Everyone, you little kids... are you seriously reading this!? It's sold normally in bookstores!? Is it legal!? Books are amazing...
'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' seems to have been treated as a banned book or had its content rewritten because it contains too many discriminatory terms.
↓ There is also a translation by Hanako Muraoka. The Shinchosha edition has a wonderful cover.

Huck hears various stories at the Widow Douglas's house. He says things like, 'I kind of wanted to know a little about this Moses guy, but since he's dead, I'm not interested anymore,' which makes him a very likable kid.
He also says things like, 'Just listening to harps in heaven is boring! If Tom Sawyer is in hell, I'll go there!' I feel like I can relate to him... Also, both Huck and Tom frequently fake their identities with off-the-cuff lies. These are so incredibly specific and wonderful.

By the way, Huck told the lie above because he had been scolded for getting caught in a previous lie. It's terrifyingly surreal. Anyway, Huck is always telling lies like this. He has an abnormally fast speed at coming up with fake names and telling them to people. In Percival Everett's 'James,' I felt that the 'Huck-ness' was somewhat transferred to Jim. In 'James,' the setting is that Jim, the Black slave who was a supporting character in 'Huckleberry Finn,' actually possessed high intelligence and education and was playing the role of a 'foolish slave' in front of white people.
But really, when you read both 'James' and 'Huckleberry Finn' in parallel, you start to lose track of which episode belongs to which book. It's fun, so I highly recommend trying it. For now, I learned that to avoid dying in America, you should catch and eat berries, catfish, and rabbits. Also, both books make you want to eat cheap bread, bacon, or ham while reading. I think it's better to buy some bread before you start reading, no matter what kind it is.

'James.' Jim thinks about what kind of name would be good for him, both in his conversations with Huck and in his own mind. Seeing a shooting star, he says 'Golightly' (meaning to go with a light step) would be good. At one point, seeing the letters written on a pencil that another Black slave had stolen, he dreams of the name 'James Farber.' He travels while dreaming of a name he chose himself, not one given to him by someone else. He was a slave and had always been named by others. He had been called 'Nigger Jim.' Jim is dissatisfied with the fact that he cannot travel safely unless he is with Huck or someone who looks white. Someone's Jim. In 'Huckleberry Finn' too, the story constantly progresses while the question of whose slave Jim is always hangs over him. But when asked his name at the end, Jim declares, 'Just James,' and the story ends.

Jim tells Huck that people only listen to stories that are convenient for them and can pretend that inconvenient stories never happened. This applies to the sight of Jim being ignored in places where white people are present, the man in the show who exploits slaves without hurting them, and the scene of the locomotive worker working like a madman even though his employer is nowhere to be seen. What was impressive this time was that even toward white people who were trying to free Black people from slavery without abuse or persecution, Jim was skeptical, saying something like, 'Isn't this a policy to suppress white guilt?'

In 'American Fiction,' Monk hated writing the kind of novel he was expected to write. However, he also criticizes other Black authors. He criticizes other writers without even reading their work, assuming they are writing novels using the image of Black people that white people want to read. 'Wait, what!? You're criticizing them without reading it!?' I thought. But, it certainly does seem like he hasn't read them. That's just who Monk is.

There are infinite flaws in humans that can only be seen from the side of someone who doesn't like something. People who decide literary awards by a majority vote of only five people while saying they 'respect diversity.' Books that sell like hotcakes even with shitty titles. However, even the protagonist Monk, while thinking 'this author is insufferable' and seeing many parts of other writers he wants to disparage, was not properly looking at the family he lived with. When the maid who had been working at their house for a long time got married and left, he casually asked her if she wasn't taking her apron, and she refused, saying she hated that apron. His brother and sister tell him things like, 'We knew Dad was having an affair, you were the only one who didn't notice, because Monk was favored, but we were on the side of Dad's enemies.'
The scenes where Monk, and humans, realize they have overlooked important things are depicted countless times. That was really good.

Personally, the people around Monk were so charming that I laughed just by seeing them and felt happy. The perfectly humorous text of the sister's will, read at the scene where the family scatters the ashes of the sister who died suddenly into the sea. The neighbor who appeared immediately after scattering the ashes to complain. Cliff, the sibling who appears in the house pool and starts swimming suddenly while Monk and the others are having a hard time because they have to put their mother with Alzheimer's into a nursing home. The maid who honestly says 'Are you going to make me a smoothie? Thank you' to Cliff's friends with benefits who suddenly came to the house. I don't think these scenes were made to make you cry, but I laughed and cried in every scene, and my emotions couldn't keep up. They liked Monk and had been watching Monk, who they knew was suffering. That can also be read from the lines of Cliff, who kisses Monk in the final stages.

Humans try to see only what is convenient for them. As long as humans exist, stereotypes will exist in any era. But the fact that someone is questioning them, suffering, or hating them is also being watched by someone else. In the last scene, at the film studio, Monk makes eye contact with an actor dressed as a slave and signals something like 'What a pain.' Somehow, at that moment, Monk, who had always looked so miserable, seemed to have become a little more at ease. It was a very good movie.

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