Metaphorical use of 害虫


The title of the film _害虫_ (2001) was literally translated into English as
"Harmful Insect".

It is clear to me that the original title is a figure of speech. Is it a
established metaphor (and how would you translate it?), or did the creators of
the film just use that word creatively?




It's not an established idiomatic expression. It does not have any surprising
connotation unique to the Japanese language, such as
[大根](http://jisho.org/word/%E5%A4%A7%E6%A0%B9) ("radish" → unskilled actor /
ham actor) and [鳥頭](http://jisho.org/word/%E9%B3%A5%E9%A0%AD) ("birdhead" → a
person who forgets things soon).

It's not really a "creative" metaphor unique to this film, either. I believe
harmful/useless people have been referred to as 害虫(のような人間) hundreds of times
in works by various novelists and lyricists. For what it's worth, I checked
the first 200 hits of 害虫 on
[BCCWJ](http://pj.ninjal.ac.jp/corpus_center/bccwj/en/), and two of them were
figurative. And here are [the results of 害虫 on Uta-Net](https://www.uta-
net.com/user/index_search/search2.html?frm=ichiran&kw=%E5%AE%B3%E8%99%AB), a
lyrics search engine.

