Shit Bow: Larry David and Roland Barthes on the Art of Japanese Etiquette

Larry David and a Japanese restaurant manager discuss 

bow techniques in Curb Your Enthusiasm [S8/E7]

When is a bow not a bow? Or, more precisely, when is a bow a disguised insult, rather than a sincere form of apology? The answer, according to Curb Your Enthusiasm, is when it's a shit bow ...

Having had his takeaway order messed up by his favourite Japanese restaurant due to insecure packaging, Larry seeks an apology from the manager (brilliantly played by Andrew Pang) - something which he duly receives, along with an accompanying bow much to his great delight: "We could learn a lot of things from Japan."  

However, although initially excited by the bow and expressly stating that it was not something with which he could possibly quibble, he later starts to worry that it was perfunctory, rather than invested with genuine feeling. Seeking to confirm his suspicions, Larry accosts a group of Japanese tourists in the park and asks to be enlightened on the finer points of bowing.

He is told that a sincere apology requires a deep bow and that the bow he received - which was not much more than an exaggerated nod in his direction - not only fails to express sorrow or regret, but is insulting and dismissive. In fact, Larry is told he has been given a shit bow and that no bow would be better than that bow. 

Armed with this new information, Larry returns to the restaurant in order to confront the manager. The latter, however, is uninterested in either apologising further, or discussing Japanese etiquette. Hoping that he might be able to quickly resolve the issue and get on with his job, he repeatedly tells Larry that a bow is a bow.

Of course, Larry being Larry, he's not going to let it go: "Is it possible", he asks, "you don't know the bow rules?" This naturally irritates the manager, who insists that he understands the bow rules perfectly and has done so since a young age: "I was raised by bow rules.'"

He's understandably not too pleased either to hear his bow described as a shit bow. But, if only to get Mr David to go away, he finally gives him the deep bow that the latter felt entitled to. A satisfied Larry finally leaves, but not without declaring his intention to research the matter further online.

It's a great series of scenes and one can't help wondering what it is that Larry thinks we might learn from Japan - or, rather, what he calls Japan. For like Barthes's Japan in Empire of Signs, Larry's Japan is essentially an imaginative space; somewhere faraway providing a reserve of features whose manipulation and invented interplay affords amusement and allows for the fantasy of a symbolic system that is entirely alien to that found in the West.

Indeed, as with most other things, people and places, Larry is essentially indifferent to the real Japan, living, as he does, almost exclusively in a comedic world of his own invention. What excites him is not so much "another metaphysics, another wisdom (though the latter might appear thoroughly desirable); it is the possibility of a difference, of a mutation, of a revolution in the propriety of symbolic systems".

In other words, Larry is excited by the possibility of previously unheard of rules and new forms of social minutiae. Unlike most Westerners, Larry doesn't regard formal displays of politeness, for example, as suspicious or as signs of hypocrisy. He genuinely loves the bow as he does all forms of coded behaviour - it's modern informality and inconsiderate behaviour (such as wearing shorts on an airplane, or pig-parking) that drive him nuts.

Larry doesn't buy into what Barthes terms the Occidental mythology of the person that allows for - and encourages - the free expression of one's natural feelings or authentic inner self. For this ultimately results in impolite and selfish behaviour. Larry wants society with all its complexity and artifice; for it's these things that provide him with his comic material. And, indeed, his ethics ...

See: 

Curb Your Enthusiasm, Season 8, Episode 7: 'The Bi-Sexual', dir. David Mandel, written by Larry David, Alec Berg, David Mandel and Jeff Schaffer (2011). Click here to watch a clip on YouTube of the scene in the park; or here to watch the later scene in the restaurant.     

Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard, (Hill and Wang / Noonday Press, 1989), pp. 3-4. 

Stupeur et tremblements

Cover of the Faber and Faber English 

paperback edition (2004)

In some ways, Amélie Nothomb's Stupeur et tremblements (1999), can be regarded as a fictional supplement to Roland Barthes's L'Empire des Signs (published thirty years earlier) and ought not to be thought of simply as an autobiographical novel.

For like the latter, Nothomb's book is an attempt to isolate a certain number of features and from out of these delineate with great delicacy and ingenuity a system called 'Japan'. It succeeds because she wisely avoids any banal sociological analysis of Japanese corporate life, just as - despite autobiographical elements - she avoids offering a simple recreation of her own past. 

Central to her little comedy of manners is the question of etiquette. Amélie-san longs not so much for intimacy with Fubuki, but informality. For informal relations are so much more desirable to a modern, occidental sensibility than the strictly coded ones that exist within the Japanese work place. 

For to be informal, even at the risk of seeming impolite, is to be true according to the logic of Western morality which rests upon what Barthes terms a mythology of the person; we believe ourselves and others to be composed of a false, public exterior and of a personal, authentic interior which it is our duty to know.

And so it is that, after a certain period of time, we naturally assume we have the right to be ourselves in the company of others; further, we also think we have the right to know them as they really are, stripped of any social status or superficial difference on which they might pride themselves. For is it not taught that all souls are equal in the sight of God.

That we could believe other and behave differently is something that Amélie-san has to learn. But whether she does learn this is debatable, for her attachment to a democracy of souls seems extremely strong. Thus, at the end of her time working for the Yukimoto Corporation, she bids farewell and shakes the hands only of those colleagues who have acknowledged what she regards as her essential humanity.

For this reason, one can't help but wonder about the nature of the great happiness that Fubuki's letter brings at the end of the novel; does Amélie-san feel that it signals some kind of final victory and vindication?

I would like to think not, but there is something profoundly disturbing and even ugly about the character of Amélie-san: like a soul-devouring monster, she's obsessed with discovering the truth of poor Miss Mori and, via what Barthes calls the willed simplicity of Western manners, she seems determined to declare her affability, her honesty, and her authenticity whatever the consequences for herself and those around her.

Ultimately, and ironically, she's the bully in the office place! For her friendship is something that cannot be refused and her pity is a type of poison.