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?
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2017-10-25T12:36:45.533
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words
Metaphorical use of 害虫
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.
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