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

  “Do you mean what you’re saying?” His eyes were huge and horrified.

  “Do you wear a different size?” I asked mischievously.

  “Rei, you’re being impossible! If you leave me here without my bathing trunks, I’ll be completely naked. It is safer that you remain half dressed and concealed by the water than leave me with nothing at all. What if someone discovers me and reports me to the police?”

  “That’s not logical at all!” My mirth was starting to fade.

  “Look! Do you see those boys over there? What are they playing with?”

  I looked, and indeed there were a couple of elementary-school-age boys about twenty feet away lounging on water rafts. One of them was fashioning a kind of mask out of my bikini bottom, using the leg holes for eyes.

  “This is just too bizarre,” I said.

  Takeo swam over to them quickly and started talking. I couldn’t hear his explanation, but I saw the boy’s mouth moving in response, and then he rather reluctantly handed over the bottoms to Takeo.

  “Thanks. Now they’ll know they’re mine, won’t they?” I grumbled when Takeo had swum back to me with my bikini bottom.

  “The weird thing is, when the bikini washed up against their raft, they didn’t think it was a bikini bottom. They thought it was a Batman mask.”

  “Crazed by comics,” I said.

  “Exactly. I let them remain in their state of ignorance.”

  “I guess this must be a message to me,” I said. “I shouldn’t look down on comics. They’ve saved my reputation.”

  Chapter Four

  Two hours later we were sprawled across Takeo’s futon, surrounded by comics. As I lay watching Takeo read aloud to me, I found it hard to keep my pencil moving, dutifully translating the words into English and writing them down. My attention kept wandering over his golden brown back and down to his loose-fitting drawstring pants.

  Takeo, showing samurai toughness, was intent on finishing the translations first. His voice droned softly.

  “In a central Tokyo hospital on New Year’s Day not so many years ago, a baby girl was born. The baby had laughing green eyes and black corkscrew locks that were quite unusual, so her loving family named her Mezurashiko, ‘rare and special child.’

  “Because Mezurashiko did not resemble a typical Japanese child, the neighbors were convinced that she was the result of an illegitimate union between her mother and an alien worker. Poor Mezurashiko was bullied all the way through high school. Little did anyone know that Mezurashiko’s father really was an alien—a handsome Martian who had left his spaceship and slipped through an apartment building window on one of Tokyo’s hottest nights to plunder the sleeping body of Mezurashiko’s mother. This alien’s genes passed to little Mezurashiko, who became capable of incredible feats. When she matured, Mezurashiko decided it was time to make use of some of her powers.”

  I jotted down the translation, my thoughts somewhere else. If I had powers, I would have transformed the space around us. The Kayama house was a classic seaside villa built in the 1920s: rare because it hadn’t been torn down, but sad because of the state into which it had fallen. Many tiles were missing from the charmingly arched roof, and on the inside, there were water-stained walls and tatami mats that housed a zoo of insects. Takeo had been living here almost all summer. I didn’t know how he did it. Sure, I could see bits of his work here and there—a bathroom with new plumbing, and patches on walls that were going to be repainted. I saw he’d been working hard. At least his futon was new and had nice cotton sheets on it. But he needed serious decorating help, given that the walls were covered by posters of endangered animals and martial artists that had to be relics of Takeo’s boyhood, and the floor was covered with stacks of magazines.

  I returned my attention to the two-hundred-page volume of Mars Girl. It was a far cry from the concise, colorful comic books I’d read in the United States. In Mars Girl, there was tremendous emphasis on facial expressions but very little attention given to drawing the background of the scenes. In that way, contemporary Japanese comics were also very different from the painstakingly etched wood-block print illustrations of the previous century. Of course, an artist couldn’t do much in a black-and-white box two and a half inches long by four inches wide. Manga were artistically compromised from the start.

  “I don’t think Mars Girl is worthy of review,” I said.

  “Just as you thought Ogre Slayer, Ah! My Goddess, and Tokyo Babylon weren’t worthy,” Takeo said, throwing back his head and taking in the last few drops of a can of Asahi Super Dry Beer.

  “Your translations showed me that these comics have far stronger stories than they do art,” I said. “However, I don’t want to write about the improbable adventures of aliens mixing with the Japanese. That theme is so hackneyed it’s in half the comics that we’ve already surveyed. And if I see another schoolgirl being raped, I’m going to throw up.”

  “But I mostly bought you shoujo manga, girls’ comics, because I didn’t think you’d like the violent ones!”

  “Isn’t the rape of Mezurashiko’s mother violent?” I put down the notebook in which I’d written Takeo’s translations.

  Takeo shrugged. “The manga aimed at women sometimes have themes that are very dark. But if the readers didn’t want to read about such things, the stories would change.”

  “It makes me wonder what women want.” I got up and stretched, looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows toward the garden and, beyond it, the sea. Because the house was situated high on a cliff, I could see all the way down to the sand, where a man was tossing a ball into the ocean for his dog to retrieve.

  I felt pressure on the back of my neck and realized it was Takeo’s lips. I stayed in place, watching the man and dog play, enjoying the sensation of the kiss.

  “Is this what you want?” Takeo asked softly.

  I rested my head on his shoulder, and I thought. I had known Takeo as a friend and now a lover for a few months. I thought about him when we were together, but not a lot when I was alone. This was our first full weekend together. I wanted it to go well.

  “I want to succeed at this article. And I want to be with you,” I said, still looking out of the window. “But you know, that underwater thing that happened . . . well, I’d never done anything like that before. I don’t think I’d try it again.”

  “It was a fantasy.” He turned me so that I could see his face. “I’d had it for a long time—ever since I was a teenager, really. Thank you for indulging me.”

  “Well, maybe you can return the favor.” I smiled at him. “I have a fantasy, too.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  “It involves a bed with clean cotton sheets. Air conditioner set on low. And a door that locks.”

  ***

  I slept better that night than I had in ages, lulled to sleep by the sound of waves. We’d turned off the air conditioner sometime in the middle of the night, and the cool breeze blowing in from the screened windows felt wonderful at 6 a.m. I slid out of bed, pausing to rearrange the covers over Takeo’s long, lean body.

  As I dressed for the run, I contemplated the last hour we’d spent awake making love. Takeo had revealed himself to be passionate and skilled, capable of bringing forth feelings from me that had been locked up tightly for a long time. I’d spent the past year mourning the loss of my last boyfriend, a Scottish lawyer who had simply gotten tired of Japan and moved on, expecting me to go wherever he did. I wouldn’t go. I loved Hugh, but I loathed the idea of being his dependent. Soon enough, his letters to me dropped off, and I heard he’d started a liaison with another woman. Still, as angry as I was with Hugh, I thought about him constantly.

  I’d told myself that the best thing for me was to find a Japanese boyfriend, someone who obviously wanted to stay in the country. Takeo had not seemed interested in me when we first met months earlier at the Kayama School, but as we got to know each other, sparks began to fly.

  Could I love Takeo? I asked myself as I unlatched the h
ouse’s handsome wooden sliding doors and went out into the splendid morning for my run. When I was with Takeo, I enjoyed him thoroughly. But when I was at work, I forgot about him. Not that there were other men around that drew my attention—I thought with repulsion of Alec Tampole at the Gaijin Times. Over the last several months, work and pleasure had become sharply separated for me. When I worked as an antiques shopper or arts writer, it consumed all my energy.

  I finished stretching and started off in a slow jog down the bumpy beach road into the heart of the village of Hayama. I ran past the wall guarding the emperor’s summer villa from prying eyes. A group of stone-faced policemen were standing guard next to a dark gray police bus, a vehicle ready to cart off anyone who threatened the monarchy.

  The imperial family was not at the villa that weekend. Takeo said that we’d have suffered massive traffic delays if they had been there.

  “I saw the emperor and crown prince walking on the beach when I was seven,” Takeo had said to me. “My father told me that we should walk away so they wouldn’t be embarrassed by having to see us. He said they wanted privacy. But I waved really hard, and the crown prince waved back. So I was glad, even though my father made me go to bed without dinner that night.”

  Takeo had disobeyed his father and been punished. I wondered what his father would think if he knew his son and I had become lovers. I’d first met Masanobu Kayama, just as I’d met Takeo, after a murder of a teacher at the Kayama School in the spring. The crime had been solved, but with that came a number of embarrassing discoveries, some of which pertained to Mr. Kayama’s private life. I’d not told these things to Takeo, seeing no point in driving the father and son further apart.

  I turned my mind firmly toward Project Manga, as I had begun to identify my Gaijin Times assignment. I would stay true to Mr. Sanno’s desire to discuss the aesthetics of comic books, while offering the kind of straightforward shopping advice for which I was known. Perhaps Japanese comic books were collectible. I knew that in the United States, old comics could sell for thousands of dollars. To learn about the comics market in Japan, I would probably have to move from common convenience shops such as the one where Takeo had found popular girls’ comics for me and into specialty stores and flea markets.

  The beach road had narrowed, slowing the traffic of convertibles, buses, and family cars. I continued on, my sights set on the Morito Shrine, which signs told me was only 500 meters ahead. I ran smoothly past a hodgepodge of tiny houses and beach shops and through a tall red gate leading to the religious haven.

  ***

  Shinto shrines are places where Japanese people go for blessings upon birth and marriage, and to make prayers to their ancestors. My own pilgrimages to Shinto shrines were usually on Sundays, when flea markets were held on their grounds in Tokyo. I found that along with looking at antiques, I loved the shrines for their great jolts of color. I liked the crisp red-orange paint that decorated the gates and trim on the shrine buildings, and I was always thrilled to see the occasional priest walking the grounds in stiff, skirted habits of turquoise and purple.

  This morning, it was early enough that the priests and worshipers weren’t around. My Asics running shoes crunching on gravel were the only sounds as I walked past the weathered wooden stands tied with small strips of white paper, unlucky fortunes that shrine visitors had received and then abandoned in order to protect themselves. It was going to be a clear, beautiful day; I could stare straight across the bay to see the top of Mount Fuji, usually shrouded by cloud cover.

  Seeing Fuji-san was a good omen, I decided. Project Manga would go well. Standing here, surrounded by old stone and wood and the waves, I felt it in my bones.

  Chapter Five

  I was stretched out on the living room’s worn tatami mats icing my knees when Takeo wandered in, dressed in a pair of wrinkled cream linen drawstring pants and a T-shirt that read SAVE JAPAN’S DOLPHINS FROM THE CRUEL TUNA FISHERMEN.

  “Are you always such an early riser? And what happened to your knees?” he asked, dropping a kiss on my head.

  “I run in the mornings because it’s cooler, and I use ice so the muscles don’t get inflamed. Sleep well?”

  “Great, thanks to you. The best dream that I remember was that I was Batman and you were Mars Girl and we had to conceive a baby superhero to defeat all forces of evil.”

  “I hope this isn’t a way of telling me that the condom broke,” I said, feeling a little bit shaky. I took great stock in dreams.

  Takeo laughed. “It didn’t. Where do you want to have breakfast after our shower?”

  “How about here? Is there bread for toast?” I loved the thick, square slices of slightly sweet white bread that were sold everywhere.

  “I thought it would be nice to have breakfast outdoors. There’s a European patisserie about two kilometers down the beach road that has the bonus of a specialty manga shop nearby. You could buy some more beach reading there.”

  “Good idea,” I said. I wasn’t thinking so much about reading as talking to the sales staff who worked there about the collectibles market.

  Breakfast passed companionably; I was pleased to be able to buy the Japan Times on the street in a setting so far from Tokyo. There actually were a number of foreigners around—Italians, Americans, and Australians savoring croissants and café au lait near our table. Afterward we dodged traffic to cross the beach road to Animagine, the comic store that Takeo had mentioned. On the door, the store name was written in English and Japanese, with the -gine part of the name illustrated with the Japanese kanji character for person, which was pronounced ‘jin.’ It was a contrived, cutesy play on words, but easy enough for a child—or someone like me—to understand.

  Animagine stood out from the mostly weather-beaten shops along the beach, a small, ferro-concrete box of a building painted a vibrant purple, with automatic doors that slid open as you approached. I was enveloped by frigid air-conditioning and the sixties girl sound of Puffy.

  The popular duo had recorded the theme song for a television anime program, I learned from a product display in the front of the store. I hadn’t realized that recording superstars would be willing to lend their energies to animation. Takeo ambled through the shop, bouncing a little to the beat. He loved lighthearted, sugary Japanese pop music, while I preferred Japanese artists with a darker, harder sound, such as Cornelius.

  The store was filled with low bookcases packed solidly with comic books. Even though all the manga I’d seen were printed in black and white, their covers were a riot of colors; the cover was where the artist spent his energy. Maybe the cover was going to be the most collectible aspect, I thought. I wandered through the rows of magazines, passing comics featuring schoolgirls, baseball players, aliens in outer space, clowning babies, fuzzy animals, and samurai.

  I was taken aback by the shoppers’ behavior in the store. Why was a sweet-looking fourteen-year-old girl reading Neon Genesis Evangelion, a comic book with a cover featuring robots? A samurai comic was in the hands of a woman my age, and a twenty-year-old man was lost in a comic book about schoolgirls.

  I evaluated the store’s staff, two young, shaggy-looking people of indeterminate gender, wearing baggy overalls with loose T-shirts underneath. When I got closer, I saw lipstick on one whom I decided had to be female.

  “I hope that you can help me,” I began. “My name is Rei Shimura, and I’m writing an article for the Gaijin Times about manga.”

  “The owner should answer,” her shaggy male companion said, approaching from behind. “He’s based in Tokyo.”

  “I’m really interested in asking about shoppers in this particular store,” I said, dreading the thought of a sit-down interview with a businessman similar to Mr. Sanno. “I want to know what the word on the street is about collectible magazines.”

  “Collectible?” The boy rolled the word around in his mouth. “You mean, the magazines that people are buying these days? There’s something for everyone’s taste. What do you like?”

&nb
sp; “I’m not shopping for myself,” I said patiently. “I want to learn which of the older manga are valuable collector’s items, and which of the new ones might be valuable in the future.”

  “Manga aren’t valuable,” the boy said slowly, as if talking to an idiot. “They only cost two hundred to a thousand yen, maximum. There are some special issues and anthologies, full color all the way through, that go for up to six thousand yen. Would you like to see some of those?”

  “No, thank you,” I said, frustration growing. I probably was using the wrong words. “I need to learn about the comics that rise in value. You know, the ones that young people save and then sell to collectors later on to make a profit.”

  “Nobody saves comics.” The young salesman shook his head. “People throw them away once they’ve been read. They’re cheap goods, neh?”

  “Surely some people save comics. How else would you have auctions of valuable comics of the past?”

  “That might happen in America, but not here,” he said. “In Japan, people don’t have room to store comics. The only people who might keep comic books of a particular series around their apartments are the fans who draw doujinshi, and that’s just because they’re using the comic books as a model.”

  “I’m afraid that I don’t know what doujinshi are,” I said, even though Rika had mentioned them at the Gaijin Times. I wanted to hear an expert interpretation.

  “Doujinshi are limited-issue comic books created by amateur artists.” The young woman, looking a trace defiantly at her colleague, spoke up. “They use mainstream comic characters but give them new adventures. Within doujinshi, there are two camps: parody and original. Which are you interested in?” she asked.