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

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?”

“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.

“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?”