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

by Sujata Massey

  “Then why can’t I rent an apartment without a Japanese guarantor? And why must I always carry an alien card?” I snapped. “One of the things the reporter said about the dead foreigner was that he wasn’t carrying his alien card. That detail made him sound extra deviant!”

  “The alien card-carrying law may change soon, but you know, when I was studying in the United States, my visa didn’t allow me to work. What’s fair?” He raised his eyebrows.

  “But you don’t need to work,” I protested.

  “Come on! I wanted to work then, and I want to work now.” Takeo put his cup of sake down with a click. “I feel terrible having to scrape by doing home renovation because my father doesn’t think I’m good enough to take over the school.”

  “Of course you’re good enough,” I said. “It’s just that your ideals are too strong for him.”

  The telephone rang, and I sprang for it.

  “I have news, Rei.” It was Rika, sounding very excited.

  “Did they let you see him?”

  “It was—it was really horrible when I was in there, Rei-san. The only way I could keep from fainting was to concentrate on making notes for the article.”

  “Mental notes?”

  “No, I brought in my Palm Pilot. The policeman at first didn’t want to let me use it, but I told him that I needed to type a mantra in order to keep from getting sick, so he allowed me.”

  Smart move. I felt the strangest twinge of envy that she had been the one taking the notes.

  “The notes helped, because I could write down things about his appearance and check them against my yearbook later. I even asked the coroner to move his lip so that I could examine the teeth, but rigor mortis had set in.”

  “Yuck,” I said.

  “I remember that Nicky’s teeth were beautiful and so were this man’s. I explained that, and the police were impressed. In fact, they offered to pull aside the sheet so that I could see more of his body. I think they thought we had been, you know, boyfriend and girlfriend, and that I could check everything to make certain of the match.”

  “Rika! You didn’t!”

  “Okay, I didn’t. But they were very excited to have me there– but suspicious, too! They asked where I had been during that afternoon, but of course I had an excellent alibi: answering telephones at my internship. I didn’t bring up Gaijin Times, because they might be suspicious of me as a member of the press. I said Sanno Advertising instead. It’s all the same organization, really.”

  A slight deception. I guess it didn’t matter much to Rika, but it worried me. I hoped her fib about her place of employment wouldn’t come back to haunt either of us.

  “Could we return to the main topic? Did you recognize the corpse?”

  Rika sighed. ‘”Yes, it’s him. And I’m not saying it because it would make a good article, either. I’m certain that this is the foreign student I remember from our campus.”

  “What happened when you told the police what you thought?”

  “They believed me. They told me that there had been a tip that the victim might be Nicky Larsen, and they were waiting for a witness to come forward and make the identification.”

  “Did they ask you a lot of questions?”

  “Well, after I told them Nicky was not a boyfriend of mine, they asked if I knew the names of any students who knew him better. I said that I didn’t know.”

  “What about Kunio Takahashi and Seiko, the girl who dresses like a dog?”

  “If the police put those two in prison, we won’t get to interview them,” Rika said. “Let’s interview them first.”

  “I’m not a great fan of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, but I think they should know some things,” I sputtered, noticing Takeo had stopped drinking sake and was concentrating on listening to the conversation. Rika and I were speaking English; Rika had initiated the language choice, and I guessed it was because she didn’t want to be understood by people around the phone booth. Takeo had an excellent command of English. I imagined the bits of conversation I’d uttered, especially about the police, were making him curious. I reminded Rika, “This Kunio Takahashi interview might never take place, anyway. He had someone give me the message that he doesn’t want to be interviewed.”

  Takeo was sitting bolt upright. He made a motion with his hand that looked as if he were picking up a telephone receiver. I got it: He wanted to listen to what Rika was saying. I shook head and mouthed, “Later.”

  He looked puzzled, and it hit me that his English ability did not extend to lip-reading.

  “We have a commitment to Mr. Sanno,” Rika whined into the receiver. “He is expecting an article about Showa Story. We must deliver what he has asked for.”

  “Let’s meet tomorrow to talk things over,” I said in the same soothing tone I’d heard my psychiatrist father use over the telephone to distraught patients who called him at our home. “And again, thank you for being brave enough to go to the morgue. You are the one who came through with the identification?”

  The silence stretched between us.

  “I’ll be there at one,” Rika snapped, hanging up without saying good-bye.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The instant I put down the receiver, Takeo was all over me.

  “Who was that?”

  “Couldn’t you guess from my side of the conversation?” I asked, remembering how intently he had listened.

  “No. I only heard half of it.”

  “Rika says the body was Nicky. She based her identification not only on the face, but on some details she noticed before, like his teeth. There are plenty of foreigners running around with pierced ears, but not all of them have good teeth.”

  Takeo raised his eyebrows. “So your theory was right on the mark. You’re turning into a crime reporter.”

  “I don’t want to write about murder,” I confessed. “I could hand everything over to Rika, but then . . .”

  “You might not be asked to do another story for the Gaijin Times,” Takeo finished.

  “I really need the money. Even though, at this point, I’m coauthoring this article with Rika. But two hundred and fifty thousand yen split in two is still good money.” At the current dollar-yen exchange rate, my share would be almost $1,200.

  “Isn’t Rika ineligible for salary because she’s an intern?” Takeo asked. “She should be pleased to be credited as a researcher. I’d describe her visit to the morgue as assisting with research. You’re writing the article.”

  “I just don’t know if I should muddle into an area in which I have no expertise. This isn’t about antiques anymore.”

  ‘The story still ties into art,” Takeo pointed out. “Why not write an article about the Showa Story series, mentioning in passing that the gifted artist for the series could not be found for an interview, and that his colleague was mysteriously murdered? Do it your way.”

  Boyfriends weren’t supposed to be like this, I thought sourly. They were supposed to want you to stay out of trouble, safe at home under the covers and in their arms. Hugh had been like that.

  Takeo splashed more sake into my half-filled cup. “Let’s see. Where shall we start?”

  “I think I’ve figured out the storyline of the manga that I bought at Animagine, but would you help me with a full, careful translation of the prototype I found?”

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  An hour and a half later, I had a word-for-word translation typed into my laptop computer. The central plot—Mars Girl’s attempt to buy prepared food to trick the family she was staying with into believing she could cook—was the same as I’d guessed from the illustration. Takeo translated the long passages of back story that I didn’t understand. Mars Girl had been sent from the year 2000 into the early 1930s to try to prevent a terrible historical event from happening. She had been told by her outer-space bosses to show up at the home of a middle-class family who lived in the city. Making up a story about being a long-lost country cousin, she was welcomed in. While Mars Girl
struggled to gain intelligence on what she needed to do to save Japan, her host family tried to figure out who she really was. The mother had hopes that the new cousin would be a wonderful housecleaner and was stunned by the young woman’s woeful inability. The father decided Mars Girl might be a nice plaything for him, but his awkward passes were humorously defeated. The young son of the household feared that Mars Girl was competing for his inheritance, so he started a subtle campaign of dropping insects into her food and bed at every opportunity.

  “Poor Mars Girl!” I said, utterly caught up in the situation. “She should just check out and get her own apartment.”

  “In 1930s Japan? Impossible,” Takeo said. “Besides, the story tells us that she is needed to protect that family, as well as society, from a great evil. On the day that Mars Girl ventured out to buy some cooked rice to pass off as her own home cooking, she stumbled across a gangster threatening the owner.”

  I’d assumed on my brief pass through the comic earlier that the gangster wanted money. But in Takeo’s translation, it became clear that the gangster was trying to pressure the owner into paying a tax to a new political party.

  “The party in this comic is even more extreme than the conservative imperialists who led Japan into war,” Takeo murmured. “In this next frame, the gangster is explaining the party belief that Emperor Hirohito was an illegitimate claimant of the throne. The party members were asking businesses to contribute money so that their leader could raise an army to overthrow the crown.”

  “That is so hokey!” I said.

  “Oh, but it could have happened. A lot of businesses before the war—and even today, a half-century later—must make regular payments to gangsters to protect their shops from theft and their families from violence. What if all those payments no longer were distributed among various petty criminals, but went to a central source?”

  “You’d have one very rich man,” I said.

  “A powerful man with the wrong kind of ambition and ties to the military could accomplish a lot. Think of Yukio Mishima.”

  He was talking about the famous writer who, with a cadre of right-wing army officers, seized the headquarters of the Japan Self-Defense Forces in 1970. The takeover ended when Mishima, with the assistance of one of his aides, killed himself.

  “So Mars Girl was sent to stop this gangster political party,” I said.

  “That’s right.” Takeo continued with the rest of the story: how the gangster kidnapped Mars Girl, and Mars Girl then killed him by means of strangulation, dumping his body in the river. She then picked up the rice that the gangster had taken from the restaurant, and brought it home to her family, who was very pleased with her cooking for a change.

  “The problem is that Mars Girl realizes that the gangster she has defeated is just one of many underlings trying to secure funding for the new party. They’ve infiltrated the military. In this final scene, where she’s washing up the rice bowls, she is wondering if she can find a way to truly save Japan. The story will continue in the next issue.”

  “With the artist missing and the author dead, how can the series continue?” I said. “Most of the readers will have to return to the regular, commercial Mars Girl comic series.”

  “I like this amateur series better than the commercial one,” Takeo said. “I don’t know how you selected this particular story, Rei, but it’s excellent. I don’t read comics, but I’d buy this one.”

  “I chose it for the art,” I said, remembering how I’d felt when I’d first seen the magazine wrapped in plastic at Animagine. “But now the whole alien theme is really appealing to me. In a way, it’s like the story of foreigners.”

  I was nowhere near as strong as Mars Girl, but I did have powers that were different from others’. As an alien in the midst of Japanese, I could look around and see insecurity and tensions that nobody else did. And by Japanese standards, I’d learned my etiquette on a different planet.

  “I’m glad you’re not destined to go back to outer space.” Takeo leaned over to kiss me and added, “Tomorrow I return to Hayama. Will you come with me?”

  With genuine regret, I said, “How I’d love to—but I’m already scheduled to meet Rika. However, if you’re going to the beach, perhaps you could do a small favor for me.” I told him that I was pretty sure I’d lost track of my address book at the beach bar.

  “What’s the bar called?” Takeo asked.

  “Bojo. It’s an open-air place with a straw roof and funny tables—they look as if they were rolled off a ship’s deck.”

  “Bojo!” Takeo exclaimed. “I can’t believe you went there by yourself.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Didn’t you see a number of men wearing dark sunglasses? Even though it was night time? And did you notice their tattoos?”

  “Are you saying it’s a gangster hangout?” I was unable to resist an incredulous smile.

  “That’s right. You thought the gangster subplot in the comic book was unrealistic, but I can tell you it’s only too real. They lurk at the beach. Everyone pretends they don’t notice them, but they’re at that bar. And I’ve heard there are no decent Japanese patrons—just foreigners, who don’t know how dangerous the situation is.”

  “Okay, you don’t have to go there,” I reassured him. “I can just telephone them to find out if they’ve got the book. What’s the area code for Hayama?”

  “Zero-four-six-eight. But would they have a telephone in an outdoor bar?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll see what the operator tells me,” I said, already dialing information. “Hello? I’m trying to get the number for Bojo, a commercial establishment on Isshiki Beach.”

  But there was no listing. I gritted my teeth, thinking how ironic it was that every other schoolgirl seemed to have her own cell phone, but a business such as Bojo could flourish without a regular telephone or flush toilet.

  “I’ll go there for you,” Takeo said.

  “No. You said that men in sunglasses made you uncomfortable.” I stopped, struck by a memory of Sunglass Man, who had been watching me in the anime coffee shop.

  “What is it, Rei?” Takeo seemed to sense my change in thought.

  I said, “I hate to admit that you’re right. I ought to be more wary.”

  “I’ll get the book for you,” Takeo said.

  “Really, I can do it myself—”

  Takeo interrupted me with a surprising, hard kiss. It ended as abruptly as it had begun, and the next thing I knew, he was out the door.

  Chapter Sixteen

  When I woke up late on Wednesday morning, I snapped on the television right away. A tabloid news program was already in full swing. Topic: Nicky Larsen. Police had finally identified the gaudily dressed body washed up on the banks of the Sumida River. The newscaster gave more details: Mr. Larsen had been a Japanese-language major at the University of Minnesota who had come to Japan in 1998 to study at Showa College. He enjoyed Japanese animation, and the bizarre costume he’d been wearing when he died was that of his beloved Mars Girl.

  So the cops had released the news, and other journalists had acted quickly and broken the story. Well, they didn’t know he was part of Showa Story—just that he was an animation fan. I was concerned about how easily the news team had picked up on the story. Would Rika and I still have a scoop?

  The picture on the screen changed to the headquarters of Dayo, the comic publisher that produced the genuine Mars Girl comic that Showa Story had imitated. Mr. Mori, a spokesman for the company, looked like a typical forty-five-year-old salaryman in his dark gray suit. He fairly droned a statement from a sheet he held between his hands.

  “It is sad news that an admirer of Mars Girl has died. The situation is especially poignant, since Mr. Nicky Larsen was a foreigner who had traveled many miles from his home in America to enjoy Dayo’s best-selling series. Our goal at Dayo is to produce comics that delight and enlighten.” Mr. Mori’s face twitched; it made him look as if he didn’t believe what he was saying, or was
about to sneeze. “Unfortunately, those young people who create their own comic books using our characters are infringing on copyrights. The artists at Dayo who produce the real Mars Girl work very hard. Our efforts are compromised when imitators charge money for unauthorized depictions of our series.”

  Mr. Mori bowed, revealing a balding semicircle, and the screen changed to a commercial.

  As a woman crooned about toilet bowl cleaner, I tried to filter her out and understand the subtext of Mr. Mori’s message. Dayo Comics was using Nicky’s death to make a jab about Showa Story‘s copyright infringement. This struck me as cold-blooded and also rather surprising. Rika had said that comic publishers didn’t care about copyright infringement. Did she really know …or was this another example of one of her quick, casual untruths?

  Could the Dayo company be somehow involved in Nicky’s death? Kunio had suddenly vanished, ostensibly to collect money to repay debts. Could he have been collecting to make a settlement with Dayo? But if so, why would he have taken on all the financial load and not share it with Seiko and Nicky?

  I went out for my morning run. I was starting later than usual, so instead of cool air, there was a warm, humid fog, and heat rising up even from the cement pavement, toasting my feet. I saw a neighbor walking her golden retriever and was reminded of Seiko Hattori, the manga circle member who allegedly dressed as Mars Girl’s dog. I ended my run early, and instead of drinking my usual Aquarius or Pocari Sweat, I chose a cold Georgia Coffee from the vending machine outside Sendagi Station. I had enough change in my shorts pocket to jump on the Chiyoda Line to make a visit to Showa College.

  I’d been to the college once for a film festival; it had been a dark winter evening, and I’d gotten the impression of a modern office complex rather than a place devoted to scholarship. It was the architect’s fault; many buildings had gone up in the boom-boom 1980s, and they were the standard white Tokyo boxes that become gray fast and do nothing to improve the landscape. It was a shame, because I was willing to bet that the campus had once been nice. The college was founded in 1928, shortly after Emperor Hirohito had come to power. Reflecting the emperor’s personal taste, marine science was an important department; his original museum of marine biology was still one of the leading draws on the campus. It was a round building built of stones with windows shaped like portholes. Because it was old and quirky, of course I considered it the most attractive building.