The Floating Girl: A Rei Shimura Mystery (Rei Shimura Mystery #4) (3 page)

“I know very little about
manga,”
I said stiffly. “My background is in Japanese decorative arts.”

“Manga
are today’s most important art form,” Mr. Sanno said. “Can’t you write that in your column?”

A battle raged inside me. I wanted to walk away from this stupid fantasy comic book of Mr. Sanno’s, but I didn’t want to give up seeing the phrase “Rei Shimura Antiques” in fourteen-point type once a month. I spoke carefully. “My goal is to help the
Gaijin Times
be the best that it can be. That is why I would be willing to resign if my writing doesn’t fit the new format.”

“Are you hoping to be fired, Rei?” Alec asked. I was really beginning to hate him.

“I know what you can do, Rei-san!” Rika offered. “Since you are a serious person, you can write a serious article about the history and artistic significance of
manga.
If you can present
manga
in a worthwhile light, the readers will become prepared for the switch to the new format.”

“That’s right, Miss Fuchida! Please help with Miss Shimura’s assignment.”

Rika, sitting across from me in her short pleated skirt, knee socks, and braids, still looked more like a junior-high-school student than a senior at Showa College. But at that moment I, and probably every other staffer in the room, could imagine what form she would emerge into as surely as Clark Kent transformed himself into Superman: She’d be Rika Fuchida,
Gaijin Times’s
youngest-ever editor in chief.

“Jealousy is a sin,” I muttered into my arm on Saturday afternoon.

“What’s that? I can barely hear you over the waves.” Takeo Kayama was rubbing some sort of super-organic sunblock on my back. Up and down, back and forth—his fingers, rough from gardening, created a pleasant abrasive sensation on my skin.

“I’m jealous of the student intern at the
Gaijin Times,”
I said in a louder voice. “Rika Fuchida was a glorified gofer until yesterday, when she turned out to have the equivalent of a Ph.D. in cartoon history! It’s all so suspicions. She started working at the magazine just a few months ago. There was nothing on her resume about her knowledge of animation. It surfaced at just the right time, in front of the right person. I wonder if she knew in advance what was going to happen to the magazine.”

“Whatever the situation, you should feel glad for her,” Takeo said. “You’ve had your own share of lucky breaks. As have I.”

“That’s true.” I counted Takeo Kayama as one of my blessings. In the few months that I’d known him, he’d brought a considerable amount of fresh air and sun into my life. It was an ironic union, because I was struggling to become an upwardly mobile capitalist while Takeo was on a downward slide, forgoing a management role in his family’s prosperous flower-arranging school to plant his own organic seedlings.

“Are they paying you as much as usual for the story?” Takeo asked, putting the cap back on the tube of sunblock. We were on Isshiki Beach in Hayama, a seaside town an hour south of Tokyo where Takeo’s family had a summer house. Ping-pong balls and Frisbees were in the air along with the excited squeals of a few hundred schoolchildren on their brief summer vacation.

“Mr. Sanno became so thrilled about Rika’s idea that he asked me to write something longer than I usually do. He even said to me later that he’d pay me more for it. He really wants some kind of article that gives
manga
credibility.”

A toddler stumbled by, kicking up clods of dark brown sand. I readjusted the sun umbrella we’d rented for 5,000 yen, and reminded myself that the dirty-looking sand was that way for geological reasons. Isshiki Beach was supposed to be one of the cleanest beaches in the Tokyo area because of the proximity of the emperor’s summer villa. However, there was an ominous trickle coursing through the sand from the beach’s sole outhouse-style lavatory.

“You don’t have to do it, but I think you’d have a good time,” Takeo said, resuming the discussion of my potential assignment. “All you have to do is read comic books for a few days, then sit down at the computer and type out your impressions of the comics versus what you know about wood-block prints.”

“There are two problems with that,” I said. “The first one is that I know the wood-block artists are going to be far superior in terms of artistry and social relevance. It’s a foregone conclusion, and one Mr. Sanno won’t want to hear. The second problem is one that you know well. I can’t read much Japanese.” Adult
manga
were written almost completely in kanji, the vast system of pictographic symbols for words that had originated in China. At the beach snack shop, I’d paged through a magazine called
Morning
and found it almost indecipherable.

“Hmmm, maybe this will get you to finally learn to read.” Takeo continued to massage my back.

I was a nearly fluent speaker but was stymied at reading and writing—a great embarrassment for me. The only way to fix it was to seriously study kanji for a few hours a day, but at the end of the day, after having pounded the pavements of Tokyo looking for antiques and suitable homes for them to enter, all I wanted to do was read escapist English-language fiction.

Takeo looked at me serenely. His complexion had tanned to copper from his work as a gardener, work that was extremely unusual for a man with his background, but something he’d chosen to do to get away from his father’s dictatorial ways. Takeo was only twenty-eight, but several months of labor under the sun had already carved a few lines around his eyes and built lean muscles that were noticeable as he crouched over me in nothing more than his black swimming trunks.

“You know how hard reading is for me,” I began.

“You always say that,” Takeo told me in a voice as warm as the day. “Just as I should be practicing English but have given up because you’re so good at speaking Japanese. But I don’t live in America, and you live here. I’ll help you learn to read. We’ll work on the
manga
together.”

“But this should be a time for you to relax,” I said, feeling grateful but a little bit disappointed at the same time. I had hoped that this would be a special weekend for us to figure out where our relationship was really headed. Hence the no-telephone-contact-until-Monday message I’d left with my answering service. Hence the cooler I’d packed with the most delectable home cooking. Hence the bikini wax.

As I lay in my twisted position, trying to sense Takeo’s feelings, a ping-pong ball smacked the center of his forehead. I gasped as a young man wearing a semi-obscene red nylon thong jogged over to retrieve the ball. He apologized with a flurry of bows and darted off, his muscular buttocks gleaming under a sheen of oil. It was amazing how young Japanese men had so little modesty about their nether regions. In a stark contrast, most of the beach’s females wore maillots, regarding their stomachs as an X-rated region. I was the only one in a Speedo bikini. It had been my bathing suit of choice for the last ten years because it kept my tummy in firm check and the top had straps that couldn’t be pulled down by waves.

“Would you like to go for a swim?”

“Actually, I can’t swim very far,” I said. When Takeo looked puzzled, I said, “I swim, but you’ll see I’m rather clumsy. My best stroke is the sidestroke. Obviously, I’m not going to be able to make it as far as the buoys, if that’s where you want to go.”

Takeo smiled at me.  “You don’t have to swim anywhere. A lot of people are just hanging around.”

I looked and saw what he meant. Many of the people in the water seemed to be floating in place, playing ping-pong, or just standing together, conversing.

“Our things will be safe on the beach?” I asked, gesturing toward my beach bag holding the comics and a little money.

“Of course. This is Japan!” Takeo laughed and set off in a sprint for the water. I caught up just as he entered the water. It was gloriously warm, almost bath-like; I sidestroked for fifty meters behind his crawl before becoming a little bit tired.

“I’m going to have to stop,” I called, stretching my legs downward to check the depth. It was about four and a half feet deep. I wondered how far out the drop-off was.

Takeo swam back to me with a few quick strokes. He dove under the surface, grabbed me by the waist, and pulled me down for an underwater kiss.

I came up sputtering and laughing. With our heads out of water, we kissed some more. We had only recently become lovers, so there was a playful quality to our time together.

“I like your bathing suit,” he said, slipping his hand along the elastic of my bikini.

“You wouldn’t dare,” I said.

“Wouldn’t I?”

Something soft fluttered across my inner thighs—was it a fish, or Takeo? I wrapped my legs around his waist, feeling my body temperature rise. “Just relax,” Takeo murmured, bending over me.

As a wave of pleasure swept over me, I was relieved the surf covered the sound of our voices. But then a problem presented itself. Sometime during our wild wiggling my bikini bottom had gotten loose and floated away. Now I was bottomless, and could go in one of two directions—either suicidally into the heart of Tokyo Bay, or back toward the hundreds of families picnicking on the sand. The irony of my recent bikini wax struck me—I’d appear as immaculately groomed as a centerfold if I had to show myself. Which I had no intention of doing.

“It’s quite simple, really,” Takeo said in between guffaws. ‘”Stay in the water. I’ll go out and buy a bikini at a beach shop. I’ll swim back to you with it. You can dress underwater.”

“No!” I laughed back just as merrily. “How can you possibly find a bikini that resembles the American one that I’m wearing? It’s a better idea that you give me your swimming trunks. At least they match my top, and the boy-leg look is in. I’ll go out and buy you some new trunks. Do you really want the same style? I think one of the vendors on the beach is selling thongs. Is one-size-fits-all okay with you?”

“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.”

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 house’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.