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

by Sujata Massey

  Maybe there was someone fascinating behind me. I pretended I had an itch on my upper back so that I could turn around and see, but the table behind me held a salaryman who was buried in a copy of Jump.

  Perhaps Sunglass Man was gay and trying to encourage eye contact with Salaryman. I got up and took a few of the doujinshi I’d finished back to the bookshelf. When I sat down, I bent my head to study the next comic book, but kept an eye on Sunglass Man. He strolled over to the main comic section, then, as I’d suspected he would, went straight for the doujinshi. He was interested in seeing what I’d read.

  The magazines I’d returned to the shelf were salacious rip-offs spoofing Sailor Moon and Neon Genesis Evangelion. I had no interest in writing about them because the artwork was not special, and the stories seemed clichéd. I didn’t want the Sunglass Man to focus on what I’d looked at. It was time to leave.

  Trying not to be obvious, since he’d sat down once more in his seat, where he could keep an eye on me, I moved my handbag onto my lap and began counting out change to leave the waitress to pay for my coffee and cheesecake. I slid the change onto the table next to me and continued to pretend to read for the next five minutes. I remembered the salesgirl at Animagine telling me that the average Japanese took ten minutes to read a comic, so I didn’t want to rush things and raise suspicion.

  At last I closed the comic and rose to go to the bookshelf to swap it for another. I felt the man watching me, but I pretended not to notice. I returned to my seat and opened the new magazine. The instant the man had gone up to investigate which doujinshi I’d returned to the bookcase, I zipped out of the coffee shop.

  I ran a few doors down the alley and dived into an electronics store, where I could hang out behind some stereo speakers and see through the window whether he passed. I didn’t see Sunglass Man, but I knew he might be camouflaged in the huge wave of teenagers who were now heading largely toward Harajuku Station. It was five-thirty, time to head home to eat dinner and do homework. I wondered how many of the children’s parents knew they were wasting their time shopping in Harajuku instead of attending after-school tutoring. I also doubted the parents would be pleased about the kind of men who lurked beside the teenage patrons of anime coffee shops. It could have been Kunio Takahashi, of course, which would mean there was no danger, but I’d blown a chance at an interview. The fact that Sunglass Man had black hair, and not red-brown as Chiyo had described, might simply mean that Kunio had gone back to his natural color.

  The evening news was blaring from a television turned on in the back of the store, so I could listen to the latest developments as I awaited my stalker. Maybe it was just an idle fascination he’d had, and he didn’t intend to follow me from the coffee shop. I was famous for my overreactions. I listened to the news, thinking about how a lot of people in Japan had serious problems. The Japanese Nikkei stock index had dropped another two points… thirty children had fallen ill from E. coli contamination of boxed lunches… a man had been found dead in the Sumida River.

  A man had been found dead in the Sumida River. I lost interest in watching the street and rushed to the back of the store and stood in front of the screen to take in the dirty green-brown river. I’d been there before, I realized, because I recognized it. Or had I? The locale mentioned was one that was a little closer to Kunio’s neighborhood than mine.

  A local fisherman who had found the body was speaking to the reporter. In a quavering voice, he said, “There was a strange marking on the face. At first I thought it was blood, but now I think it was ink.”

  “A marking could be the sign of a gang,” the newsman said, clearly attempting to coax the man into agreement.

  “I don’t know about that. Anyway, this person was not a regular man. You could tell from the clothes. Plus he was foreign, with blond hair.”

  “Please explain about the clothing!” the newsman encouraged.

  “He was wearing a blue bodysuit. It was a strange foreigner—a young man dressed like a lady, with a silver skirt and high-heeled shoes.”

  “Was the body fully clothed or partially naked?” the newsman asked.

  “Turn the camera off,” another voice shouted from the television. A police officer had realized belatedly that the interview was going on. He began haranguing the reporter for interfering with police business.

  I swapped the first fear that I’d had for a new one.

  Kunio had not been murdered.

  Nicky, his friend from next door, had.

  Chapter Twelve

  I made my way out of the electronics shop and into the bustle of Harajuku, feeling both sad and stunned by the news. Nicky was a misogynistic creep, but hadn’t deserved to die. Nobody did. If I had trailed him to his matinee and later meeting with his comic book cohorts, he might have lived.

  Outside Harajuku Station, there was a short pedestrian bridge leading to Yoyogi Park. Crouched along the bridge, young people dressed in costumes as shiny as the one Nicky had been wearing were chatting, playing boom boxes, and watching a tiny battery-operated television. So these were the cos-play, or costumed player, types that Rika and her friends had mentioned. They looked like Halloween celebrants trying to appear as transvestites; they were too cute to be the real thing.

  I approached a young man dressed as Sailor Moon, a well-known girl character wearing a sailor suit uniform. “Sorry to bother you, but I wonder if you heard the news… the news about someone dressed like Mars Girl who died?”

  Through a pair of thick false eyelashes, the boy’s eyes bugged out at me. “I don’t play Mars Girl. I play Sailor Moon.”

  “I see that.” I stopped, amazed that he wasn’t at all interested in the prospect of a fellow animation enthusiast’s death. “Actually, I’ve been trying to locate members of a doujinshi circle that puts out its own version of the Mars Girl comic.”

  “Ah, you mean Showa Story,” Sailor Moon said, his voice a touch warmer. “The girl in the circle is only one who we know. She dresses like a dog.”

  “That’s exactly who I’m interested in finding,” I said.

  “Seiko is always busy, even though she doesn’t actually draw the comic. She’s responsible for getting it printed.”

  “Can you give me a physical description of her?” I asked.

  “Hey, are you weird or something?” He looked at me dubiously, as if I, in my jeans and T-shirt, were a much more eccentric character than he in his schoolgirl uniform.

  “I need to know what she looks like if I’m going to find her,” I said between gritted teeth.

  “Oh. Well, she has long yellow fur and whiskers. She wears a black leather dog collar. She’s very distinctive.”

  “You don’t know what she looks like outside of the costume?”

  “Oh, you won’t be able to identify her that way. I’ve seen her once without her costume, and she just looks like a typical Japanese girl!”

  “Did you… did you happen to hear of any men who dressed as Mars Girl?” I asked Sailor Moon, not hoping for much.

  “Seiko-san said that the Amerikajin in the circle played Mars Girl. I think his name was something like Nikko.”

  Nicky. I thought of telling Sailor Moon that I thought Nicky was the dead one. However, I didn’t know for sure, and I didn’t want to start false rumors. I thanked Sailor Moon and spent a few minutes looking for Seiko in her yellow dog costume, just in case she was around. After twenty minutes, I gave up and continued on my mission. Next stop: Show a Boy. When I reached the club, Marcellus was standing outside, offering leaflets to female pedestrians.

  “Miss Rei, say hey, walk this way,” he warbled as I approached. The happy rumble of his voice made it clear that he didn’t know what might have happened.

  “I have to tell you something,” I began.

  “You’re not going to be able to promote the club in your magazine? Well, that’s fine, cherie. I can smooth things over with the mama-san.”

  “It’s about one of the men who works here,” I said.

 
; “Are you still looking for Kunio? I tried to tell you before, he’s a painter, not a host.”

  “I’m talking about Nicky.”

  “He’s not here yet. Chiyo might fire him, she’s so angry that he’s late.” Marcellus raised his eyebrows theatrically.

  “Well, actually, she should go to the police. According to a news broadcast I just watched, the body of a foreign man was found in the Sumida River!”

  “There are plenty of foreign men in Tokyo,” Marcellus said, but his voice quavered. “It cannot be Nicky. He will be arriving any minute.”

  “I pray that I’m wrong. It’s just that he was dressed in a special costume when I saw him this morning, and the dead man they were talking about on television was wearing same thing. A Mars Girl costume.”

  While Marcellus had been listening, he had kept his arm idly outstretched. Now, as a teenage pedestrian tried to take the offered flyer, Marcellus was caught off guard. He staggered, then caught himself. He apologized to the teenager, and when she was out of earshot, he asked me, “Did you see his face?”

  “No, the body was covered. Anyway, you or somebody who knows Nicky well should go to the police.”

  “But I can’t! There is too much danger.”

  Danger? He must be paranoid about the police.

  “I understand,” I said. “It’s hard to deal with the Japanese police. I’ll try to think of someone else . . . actually, I heard the name of another member of the doujinshi circle: a girl called Seiko Hattori.”

  “Oh! The one like a dog?” Marcellus asked.

  He did know a lot about Showa Story, I was realizing. “It sounds as if you know her. Maybe you could suggest to her that she go to the police?”

  “I don’t know her well. Seiko-san used to come inside for the show sometimes. But the mama-san didn’t like her there. She was banned.”

  “Wow. Is there any way that you can put us in touch?”

  Marcellus looked uncomfortable. “All I know is that she was Nicky’s classmate at Showa College.”

  “Well, maybe she can help me make the identification.”

  “You are so concerned, Rei-san,” Marcellus said softly. “Why? Did you love him, too?”

  “No, of course not.” I felt my cheeks getting hot. “It’s just that I saw him earlier today, and I wonder if there was anything I could have done to stop him from meeting his end.”

  “There is no reason to believe he met his end,” Marcellus said soothingly. “Why, he will probably walk in soon and we will all laugh about your worries.”

  “I wouldn’t laugh,” I said. “Not when somebody’s died.”

  Marcellus scrawled something on a leaflet and gave it to me. “Call me at home tomorrow morning. I’ll tell you that he came in, all right?”

  “Thanks.” As I walked off, I wished that Marcellus was right about my fears being ungrounded.

  ***

  I have lived long enough in the city to have a number of good friends to turn to in times of emergency. Interestingly, most of them are men. First is Richard Randall, my best friend and ex-roommate, who was away for the summer leading Japanese tourists through London and Paris. The others are Ishida-san, an antiques dealer who can detect fraud at fifty paces, and my cousin Tsutomu ‘Tom’ Shimura, a doctor at St. Luke’s Hospital, who keeps peace between me and my Japanese family. And finally, I know Lieutenant Hata, who works for the Tokyo Metropolitan Police in the Roppongi District. Lieutenant Hata is still so formal with me that I don’t know his first name. However, the fact that I’d given him assistance a couple of times made him likely to take my call. I thought it would be better to make contact with him before I pressed on with Kunio or Seiko.

  I arrived home and flipped through my business card collection until I found the dog-eared card that the lieutenant had given me one year earlier. There was a first name on it, but I was too illiterate to read it. I called the station and found out Lieutenant Hata’s shift had ended in mid-afternoon. I gave the precinct’s secretary a message asking him to telephone me first thing in the morning.

  So I was left with myself for the night. I drained a can of Asahi Super Dry Beer and went restlessly from room to room—which didn’t take much time, since my apartment was six hundred square feet—thinking about the state of things. I kept the television on and flipped from channel to channel, watching irritating game shows until the news came on at eleven.

  The Sumida River corpse led the news on every channel. There was still no identification of the foreigner, who was now described as a European man between twenty and thirty.

  After the news segment had ended, I opened the comic book that I’d taken from Kunio’s home. How uncanny that the scene of Mars Girl’s struggle had taken place at a river and involved drowning a man. I studied the five pages containing scenes of Mars Girl getting the better of her attacker. Red bridge, green-black water. The location looked very different from the modern but run-down area where the corpse had been discovered.

  I looked back at the television screen, where a reporter was describing the alleged disfigurement of the corpse’s face. A strange circle had been drawn on the forehead in dark red ink. The fisherman who had found the body had recreated the marking on a piece of paper to show the reporter.

  The mark was a rough approximation of the symbol Mars Girl had drawn on the forehead of the slain gangster in the comic book. Whoever had killed the foreigner was making a reference to the killing in Kunio’s comic book. Either he’d been in Kunio’s apartment and looked at the walls, or he had paged through the prototype comic book that I held in my hands.

  ***

  “Shimura-san, you have described many unusual theories in the time that we have known each other. This is the strangest yet.”

  On Tuesday morning, Lieutenant Hata stood next to me on a loading dock overlooking the sandy strip next to the Sumida River where the foreigner’s body had been found. Hata’s eyes were on a barricaded area still being searched for clues by police using metal detectors, sieves, and all manner of implements. How ironic it was to be observing these beachcombers fully clad in dark blue uniforms, after having lain so recently among the nearly naked on the beach in Hayama.

  “My strange theories are sometimes wrong,” I said. “But when I know something that might be helpful, I don’t know of a better person to tell about it than you.”

  The lieutenant looked flustered by my praise. Shaking his head, he said, “You mentioned that you wanted to show me the comic book?”

  I handed it to him, open to the page with the scene of the gangster’s death.

  “It is similar,” Lieutenant Hata said, turning the page. “It’s uncanny. All the close-up illustrations of the face have the planet marked on the forehead.”

  “You’ve seen the victim’s forehead, then?” I asked, being careful to use the word victim instead of Nicky’s name. It was almost as if by not saying the name, I might guard against a bad outcome.

  “Just in photographs. And the planet on the real man’s head is not as beautifully stylized as in the manga.”

  “You’re saying that the real-life marking doesn’t look like the work of an anime artist?”

  The lieutenant shrugged. “It’s hard for me to judge. I’m not the art expert.”

  I seized on that. “I’ll let you know what I think of the murderer’s artistic abilities when you show me the body.”

  This was the second time I had voiced my interest in going to the morgue. When Lieutenant Hata had called me first thing in the morning, I’d said that I wanted to help him make an ID. To my shock, he had said that he didn’t think it was a good idea. I hadn’t known Nicky long enough to be a good judge of his identity, according to standard police thinking. It seemed that once again, I found myself stymied in Japan because I wasn’t part of an in-group.

  “Shimura-san, you know that I cannot take someone who is not a close associate of the deceased into that room for a viewing. I understand your curiosity, given the coincidences in this comic bo
ok.”

  “It’s not that I’m eager to see the corpse,” I said, feeling a mixture of incredulity and hurt. “But since nobody’s coming forward, I’m the best bet that you have.”

  Lieutenant Hata shook his head. “Why is it that you feel every murder in Tokyo is connected to you?”

  “I am connected, given that I have this in my possession—supposedly the only one of its kind.” I flapped the Mars Girl doujinshi at him. “I was watched in a manga coffee shop by a shady-looking man who knows I’m interested in Showa Story. I’d feel better if you caught up with him and asked why he was so interested.”

  “Are you saying you think that the artist who drew the scene is the murderer?” Lieutenant Hata asked.

  I shook my head. “No. I don’t know, but I wonder whether the culprit knew the members of Nicky’s circle. Nicky didn’t want me to come along and meet them yesterday. Maybe it was because he sensed danger.”

  “I can’t follow up on that until we have a firm identification of the body. When that comes, I think the line of inquiry you propose is very good. But until that time—“

  “Nothing can happen,” I finished for him.

  There seemed only one thing to do: find somebody who cared about Nicky enough to bother showing up at the morgue. I had an idea about who could pull it off, but I wasn’t sure she’d agree.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Rika had seemed pleased that I wanted to take her to lunch.

  “Is it about the manga story?” she asked when I arrived at the Gaijin Times office to pick her up after my meeting with Lieutenant Hata. Alec Tampole was out of the office trying to interview Harry Connick Jr. This meant that I could steal away with Rika without her having to ask his permission. Rika was still officially Alec’s editorial assistant.