axleblaze posted:

For me a great deal of the movie was about how Kumiko's mental illness is hidden because of cultural stereotypes and perception. Like in Japan the idea of the quiet, shy girl is normal and in a way an anime ideal. Her crippling social anxieties and inability to really interact with others is just reduced to her being shy and no one really digs deeper beyond putting other stereotypical expectations on her, unaware that she can barely even wrap her head around them.

In America she's the quirky foreigner. The people she meets figure they can't understand her because she's foreign and it's just a cultural difference. Japanese people are weird, right? This thing that might seem strange to them is probably just normal. So once again the craziness of what she's doing is just sort of dismissed and her inability to really interact with others is assumed to just be because of the language barrier.