The Floating Girl: A Rei Shimura Mystery (Rei Shimura Mystery #4)

by Sujata Massey

  “Could you explain them to me?” I was becoming intrigued.

  She nodded, looking very serious. “Parody manga are stories that are directly inspired by popular manga series. There is nothing unusual about them. Original ones might feature the same characters as manga, but not always. They are more creative.”

  “Original sounds more interesting to me.”

  The salesgirl bit her lip. “Unfortunately, the doujinshi are all wrapped in plastic, so you can’t look at them in the store. It’s because the doujinshi artists want you to buy the comics.”

  I got the hint. I’d been talking and talking, without offering any payment. “I’d like to see a good number of them, and out of that, I’m sure to buy several.”

  The girl gave her male colleague a questioning look, and he nodded.

  “Okay. In this case, you can open some of the plastic covers, but not all. And you’ll have to seal them up in plastic once she’s done.”

  Feeling annoyed by how bossy the young man was being toward his colleague, I followed the girl down an aisle of Sailor Moon backpacks. Takeo was hunkered down on the floor, reading the last of his newspaper.

  “Having fun?” he asked when I went by.

  “Don’t know yet,” I said. Since the Animagine staff wouldn’t let me open the plastic shielding on every one, I decided to evaluate the covers and set the best ones aside. This was more like being an art and antiques buyer—no reading ability required.

  The first thing that I noticed about the doujinshi that the girl handed me was that they were more expensive than regular comics, and so slender that they would take less than the proverbial ten minutes to read. However, the covers were printed in color on glossy cardboard. They had the look of special editions, not mass productions.

  I settled down on a stool to evaluate the magazines she’d handed me. Some of the covers offered obvious clues to what lay inside. I didn’t bother opening the comic with a cover featuring Sailor Moon on the toilet. The same went for the comic that showed the blue-haired girl pilot from Neon Genesis Evangelion caught in a clinch with a barely adolescent boy.

  The artists creating these comics strove very carefully to match the originals, which was not that hard when the original drawings were quite simple. Looking at the covers made me feel wistful. Were opportunities for artists so limited that the best path to recognition was imitation? I could guess that these self-published works didn’t make much money.

  I set aside a book titled Up and Up, Original June Comics.

  “Ah, June comics! You like love stories between boys,” the clerk said with some amusement.

  “Well, I’m certainly not against them,” I said, striving to stay cool. This was an exciting development in what I’d assumed was a conservative social world. I set aside a few more comics, and paused when I came to one featuring the Mars Girl character.

  “I like this doujinshi,” the clerk said. “The stories are very different from the regular Mars Girl series. It’s called Showa Story.”

  “How clever,” I said, admiring yet another Japanese-English double-entendre. The group’s name reflected the comic’s historic background: the era starting in 1926 that was known as the reign of the late Emperor Showa, more commonly referred to in the West as Emperor Hirohito. Another reading was that the title referred to comics showing stories instead of telling them.

  “I’m ready to look,” I said.

  Back at the sales counter, the clerk used a razor blade to slit open the edge of each magazine’s plastic cover. She pulled the slim booklets out as if they were rare treasures. I got a kick out of watching the process, and I made a show of wiping my hands with a tissue before touching the materials.

  The love story between boys didn’t have more than a kiss and embrace in it. I figured the drama had to be in the dialogue box, because the drawings were so uninteresting. In general, I was finding that the enticing covers surrounded black-and-white pages drawn with average skill.

  A wide-eyed Mars Girl decorated the Showa Story comic. I’d noticed she was holding a parasol with a pattern that was popular in the first half of the prewar period. That detail had sparked my interest.

  To my delight, I found the drawings inside were in color and exquisitely detailed, with great attention given to the background in each frame. Japanese houses and streets were drawn with a style similar to vintage wood-block prints. The clothing and architectural details revealed that the amateur artist had placed Mars Girl in 1930′s Japan. To my amazement, the colors were right on target for that period, and even the paper the comic was printed on had a luxurious feel—it was the silky, glossy stock typically used for art books. This was just a comic book, I reminded myself. The story had Mars Girl time-traveling back to 1930′s Japan, swapping her sleek blue bodysuit for the figure-hiding robes of a Buddhist nun. Her assignment was to pose as a nun at a Buddhist temple where a corrupt priest was swindling money from donations collected by the nuns. Mars Girl discovered the priest was spending the money at decadent dance halls in the big city, so to catch him, she camouflaged herself as a paid dancer. After dancing the tango and dodging the evil priest’s knife, she saved the money for the temple and made sure the priest was locked up in prison.

  “Do you have more Showa Story comics?” I asked, glancing again at the cover. The issue date was January 2000. The price was 1000 yen, almost $15. Steep indeed, but given the cost of the paper and color copying, I imagined there was very little profit for the artists.

  “That’s the only one we carry. I’m so sorry,” the girl said. “I asked about getting more the last time a circle member came in, but he said they were having problems with the printer and had a limited print run. She paused. “Actually, you might be able to get some back issues if you went to a manga convention. Comiket, the biggest one in the country, isn’t till August, but there’s a smaller convention called Comiko taking place in Zushi next weekend.”

  I took the flyer the salesgirl handed me and gave her the Showa Story comic I wanted to buy. One thing she’d said puzzled me. “What’s a circle?”

  “The kids who put together doujinshi call themselves a circle. It’s a more creative and friendly word.”

  “So the comic might be the work of several artists?”

  “That’s right,” the salesgirl said. “Maybe you can meet the rest of them.”

  I was already imagining a cross between the Velvet Underground and the Bloomsbury Group. I wouldn’t be able to write about antiques, but I could comment on the historical significance of artistic circles. The story was starting to interest me.

  “Do you have any contact information for the circle?” I asked.

  She yawned, covering her mouth with fingernails painted with tiny Doraemon decals. “The mailing address is given inside the cover, isn’t it?”

  I looked. “Sure. But with the deadline, I don’t have time to write letters. Do you perhaps have a phone number the circle member might have left behind?”

  Takeo had come up behind us, and I was surprised to see him carrying a shopping basket containing a few magazines. I peeked at them and couldn’t hide my giggle. They were manga devoted to the subjects of gardening and agriculture.

  “Kayama-san.” The male clerk who had been so obnoxious ducked his head in a bow. “We haven’t seen you or your sister in quite a while. How are you?”

  “Fine, and how are you, Murano-san?” Takeo answered formally.

  “May I have the circle’s phone number?” I asked again. Now that there was a customer behind me, I thought the clerk, apparently named Murano, would be more likely to settle the issue.

  “I suppose that’s okay.” Murano scratched the beginning of a goatee and said to the girl who had helped me, “Michiko, why don’t you check the inventory record and see what you find?”

  As Murano and Takeo chatted idly about surf conditions, the salesgirl rummaged around in the back. She came back with a Tokyo phone number lightly penciled onto Ogre Slayer stationery.

 
“The artist’s name is Kunio Takahashi. This is the phone number he left for us.”

  ‘‘You’ve been really helpful,” I said, taking Takeo’s magazines from him and placing them with the Mars Girl doujinshi on top of the counter. “I’ll add these to my purchase. How much do I owe you?”

  “Never mind,” Takeo said, moving to take his magazines back.

  “No, I insist.” The total of five comics came to 4000 yen, which was a little less than $40. This was significantly more than most customers were spending. In the time I’d been in the shop I noticed that many customers had come in to read comics for a half hour or so, and then left without buying anything.

  “You’re good at getting what you want,” Takeo said when we were outside.

  “Your timing helped me. It was only because you were waiting behind me that they gave me the phone number.” I started walking back on the beach road toward a telephone booth I’d seen. Takeo followed behind me, because the sidewalk was too narrow to walk side by side.

  “I doubt it,” Takeo said from behind me. “Actually, I dislike Murano, that fellow who sold you the magazines. When we were teenagers, he thought he was the greatest surfer on earth and bullied anyone else who wanted to share the waters. It doesn’t surprise me that Murano would wind up with an easy job near the beach. And he’s such a gossip. Probably everyone in town is going to know you stayed with me.”

  “Why is that a problem?” I felt a fluttering of unease.

  “I’m supposed to be renovating the house, not entertaining in it. My father would be embarrassed to hear that a guest stayed while the house was in a bad condition.”

  It was such a Japanese excuse. So typical, in fact, that I was deeply suspicious. Takeo had taken me out to a highly public breakfast spot. What was his problem now?

  “If you don’t want me to stay with you, I won’t,” I offered. “I’ve been enjoying the weekend, but I could easily go home. We could stage a big good-bye fight at the train station if you wanted that to get back to your family as well.”

  Takeo caught up with me and put his hand on my arm, forcing me to stop and look at him. “I wouldn’t want anything like that,” he said. “I’m sorry for the way I sounded. It’s hard to understand what it’s like to be part of an uptight clan. You’re lucky, Rei.”

  “If you think I’m so lucky, I’ll put your opinion to the test,” I said, smiling at him. “Let’s see if Kunio Takahashi answers his telephone.”

  Chapter Six

  The mechanical-sounding operator’s voice told me that the telephone number I’d dialed for Kunio Takahashi was no longer in service. Worrying that perhaps the salesgirl had written the number incorrectly, I dialed information and asked for a number that corresponded with the magazine’s masthead address. I was given the same dead number.

  It’s rare to get an out-of-service message in Japan, because people who move or need to change phone numbers usually sell the old number. The phone numbers are bought and traded by individuals, not by the telephone company. For example, I’d bought my home telephone and fax numbers from my ex-boyfriend Hugh when he moved from Japan. I paid him exactly what he’d bought the telephone numbers for: about five hundred dollars per number. A telephone number was a low-level investment of sorts. In the four years I’d lived in Japan, I’d seen telephone numbers sold for sums anywhere from the mid-$500s to $800.

  I couldn’t understand why the Showa Story telephone number was no longer valid. There had to be some kind of breakdown in phone service. It was irritating, because I’d need to try to track the group down through the street address. In Japan, where streets didn’t have names, that would be hard work.

  “Nobody’s forcing you to write about Showa Story,” Takeo had said when I told him about the stumbling block. “You have time to go back to Animagine and find some easily accessible doujinshi artists.”

  I shook my head. “I’m a reasonable person. If a client asks me to find an original wood-block print of Hiroshige’s Wave, I tell them why I can’t do it. There was a limited printing of the woodblock made in 1842, and all those are now in the hands of serious collectors and museums. None in antiques shops, none on the street.” I paused. “This comic book in question was printed seven months ago. It should not be an impossible feat to find the people who created it, especially since we live in the same city.”

  “How much energy do you want to put into something that is a side job for you?”

  “That column accounts for a third of my monthly income,” I said. “Probably more, if you count the added business.”

  “You won’t get any any added business out of a story on comics. If anyone gets the business, it will be Animagine and all the other manga shops in Japan.”

  “Why are you being so moody about the project, when yesterday you wanted to help me?” I mused aloud.

  “I still want to help. Unfortunately, I don’t have as much time as I’d like. I’ve got to get up on the roof and fix some tiles this afternoon.”

  “Okay, I’ll just nip back to Tokyo to check on something. I’ll bring back something nice for a late dinner.”

  I was thinking of the savory pork-stuffed shu-mai dumplings sold in to-go boxes at Yokohama Station, my transfer point for the train into west Tokyo. Shu-mai were the only lapse in my vegetarian diet.

  “But we still have leftovers,” Takeo, who was recycling-crazy, protested. “There are six courses in the refrigerator already. Why don’t we eat that?”

  “Fine.” I ended the conversation by sprinting across the street to catch the approaching bus marked for Zushi Station. If I had known how late I’d get back that night, I would have acted differently: kissed Takeo good-bye or, at the very least, told him to eat the most perishable foods first. But how was I to know?

  ***

  Shibuya is the kind of neighborhood that is best to avoid if you’re over twenty. Not because the teenagers would beat you up—crippled by their twelve-inch platform shoes, that would be an impossibility—but because their attention was not on the cars or pedestrians in their path, but on small plastic objects straight out of a science fiction comic book. The teens were holding “pocket bell” beepers, a kind of walkie-talkie carefully tuned to frequencies that allowed them to broadcast to other owners of the same gadget. With a walkie-talkie in hand, a person could send a signal to unknown others indicating a particular mood and willingness to get together. The abundance of coffee shops and rent-by-the-hour love hotels in the Shibuya side streets made any eighteen-year-old’s dream a possibility.

  It was in this epicenter of teenage lust that Showa Story had listed its office address. The artists were all probably very young, I thought gloomily as I went to the police box to ask where 6-7-22 Shibuya was located. The fact there were very few street names in Tokyo made my life an endless series of visits to the police.

  The policeman on duty didn’t know the building in question, but from the numbers he guessed that it was on the same street as the Yamato Building, a low-rise building a few blocks away that housed an Italian restaurant and various boutiques catering to teenagers. That was enough information for me to proceed, and I crossed the big intersection and proceeded behind the Tokyu department store into a street jam-packed with clothing stores and parlors where one could play pachinko, a game similar to pinball that made a deafening racket. The Yamato Building had a sign identifying it as 6-7-22 Shibuya. The Showa Story office had to be inside.

  A quick scan of the building’s registry showed the tenants included the Italian restaurant, and numerous sneaker and blue jeans boutiques, but no Showa Story.

  I decided to comb through the businesses on either side of the street, and found that a majority were boutiques, restaurants, and bars. There was a short, run-down-looking office building that seemed the most likely, but it contained a travel agency, a fax machine repair shop, and a language school.

  Showa Story had to be somewhere, but I was dizzy in the mid-afternoon heat. I needed to cool off and rest my feet, blistered
from the rubber thongs that I had stupidly worn into the city. I decamped into a coffee shop, and when I had refueled with an iced coffee, I asked the waitress about the manga circle.

  “Show a Story?” She pronounced the name as if it were three words and not two.

  “That’s right. They design comic books and supposedly work in this area. That’s all I know.”

  “Ah. I think I know where they are, but the name of their business is slightly different. It is called Show a Boy.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not what is written on the magazine. See?” I showed her the inside page, which listed the circle’s name and address.

  “Yes, that address is located halfway down the street, attached to the Yamato Building. Look for door with a doorman outside.”

  “I can’t believe I missed it.”

  “The hawker might not have been outside, so how would you know?” the waitress said.

  “What sort of doorman is he? I wonder if I can get in.”

  The waitress laughed. “Definitely. It’s a women’s club, and it’s a lot of fun. As they all say, everyone should see a foreign chin-chin once.”

  The waitress, talking in an extremely vulgar way about the male anatomy, obviously had mistaken me for a Japanese-born person. Ordinarily I would have been pleased by this, but this time I was embarrassed. A strip bar featuring foreign men? Show a boy, indeed.

  It seemed unlikely that this Show a Boy establishment had anything to do with the Showa Story circle, but as the waitress had pointed out, the address was correct. And the iced coffee ricocheting through my system was enough to give me the jolt to check it out.

  As I walked toward Show a Boy, I chided myself for having missed it the first time around. The name of the establishment was engraved on a small brass plaque next to a glossy green door decorated with the silhouette of a man tipping a top hat. A couple of high-school girls in uniforms, the skirts hitched up high and the socks puddled around the ankles, had stopped to talk to a tall, handsome man with skin the color of coffee. The man handed the girls a leaflet, and I saw them look at each other, hesitate, and giggle a bit. When the girls went inside, I took that as my cue to approach him.