The Floating Girl: A Rei Shimura Mystery (Rei Shimura Mystery #4) (7 page)

“Do you think he left town?” I asked. “The phone number for his company has been disconnected.”

Chiyo shook her head. “No, he would never leave without telling me. And besides, he just recently came back from a trip to his parents’ hometown. He came in that morning—the time I mentioned, a few days ago—with a box of souvenir sweets from there. He said that he was tired of travel and was going to stay in Tokyo for the rest of the summer, concentrating on his art.”

“So maybe he’s in some kind of artistic retreat at his apartment?” I put down my empty sherry glass with a feeling of regret. “I still don’t understand why, if he’s got a place, he wanted to use your address.”

Chiyo’s attention was elsewhere. I followed her line of vision and saw that one of the schoolgirls had knocked over her orange soda and was frantically trying to mop it up.

“Nicky,” Chiyo barked, snapping her fingers, and the handsome host in the shirtless tuxedo, who had been hovering within a discreet distance, went to clean up the table.

Onstage, Marcellus had been replaced by a light-haired man who was a younger, better-looking version of Prince William. He was wearing country tweeds, minus a shirt, of course, although he was swinging a necktie. This had to be Windsor Naughty. It was amazing, this little world I had stumbled upon, where men danced, served, and courted women. Strangely enough, I had stopped feeling guilty about looking at the dancers. With the warmth of the sherry, a strange sense of entitlement had flooded me.

“Have another drink. My treat,” Chiyo said, as if sensing my mood.

“It’s getting kind of late.” It was after seven o’clock. I thought guiltily that Takeo was waiting for me while I drank surrounded by half-clothed men.

“Very well,” Chiyo said. “If you give me your phone number, I can have Kunio call you when he finally comes in.”

Ordinarily I would have been quick to give my number, but I hesitated.

Chiyo had taken personal information about me in the past and used it to try to hurt me. I thought we were on the same side now, but I couldn’t be sure.

“Could you have him call this number?” I wrote down the phone number for Takeo’s beach house. Chiyo raised her sharp eyebrows when she saw the area code.

“So you’re a country girl now,” she said.

“That’s right,” I said, wondering whether I’d be able to make the next train departing Shibuya Station. I was eager to get out of there and tell Takeo what I had learned.

I missed the express train, so I had to take one that made numerous local stops, trying my patience. I attempted to telephone Takeo from the train platform to tell him to expect me in about two hours time, but he didn’t pick up. His answering machine did. I listened to the recording of his voice telling callers to leave a message, and found myself comparing Takeo’s cool tone to the breathy warmth of the men working at Chiyo’s club.

Marcellus and Nicky’s solicitous air had to do with the money they were being paid. I supposed it was natural. I’d behaved cordially to Chiyo, a woman I disliked intensely, because I needed something from her. Now I wondered if I should have asked her for more—to give a more complicated message to Kunio, to tell him that if he called me, I could help him start making money from his art. From the moment I’d seen his mural, I knew Kunio Takahashi’s historic interpretations deserved a major art exhibition. I could represent his work, selling it all over Japan and perhaps getting commissions for him to do similar large-scale paintings in restaurants and office buildings.

Was it a conflict of interest for me to first write about his work and then represent it?

If I had been working for a real magazine, undoubtedly. But the
Gaijin Times
had its editorial and advertising interests in a hopeless jumble. Mr. Sanno would probably be thrilled if my story turned Kunio into a prominent, profitable artist. Of course, there was a chance that Kunio already had a gallery owner or art dealer behind him. I thought not, since he was so poor that he didn’t have a mailing address.

I reminded myself that even if he was unrepresented, Kunio might not want to work with me. Artists were supposed to be temperamental. I dealt with works created by people who were long in the grave, so I hadn’t had to negotiate with any of them. This would be a new experience.

There was no point in worrying about questions that couldn’t be answered. I opened the
Showa Story
comic that I’d carried with me from the beach. Takeo hadn’t translated it for me yet, so I had to rely chiefly on the artwork to tell me the story. This particular comic began in the year 2000 with a teenage Mars Girl, in a red jumpsuit, beaming herself out of an uncomfortable situation with schoolyard bullies and into outer space. After successfully undergoing training on her home planet, Mars Girl traveled back to Earth in a space capsule loaded with various weapons, including a pretty amulet worn around her neck. At this point, being able to read the dialog boxes would have helped, since I couldn’t understand the exact power of the amulet. I was able to understand that Mars Girl’s space capsule hit some turbulence on her return trip to Earth, and she was sent back to the 1930s. There was no school, just a private house. I could tell that the artist was saying both the house and school occupied the same location because the same address, 1-2-8 Nezu, was written in the corner of each illustration.

1-2-8 Nezu. The 1 in the address referred to the first
chome
, or section, of a neighborhood in old-town inner-city Tokyo; 2 signified the block, and 8 the house number. Nezu was close to Yanaka, the pint-sized neighborhood filled with artisan sweet-makers and Buddhist temples where I lived.

Kunio was clever to use Nezu as the setting. Nezu and Yanaka had not been bombed during World War II, and there were still plenty of old buildings.

Comic books were fiction. Kunio could place schools wherever he wanted. But the insistence on street numbers intrigued me. I paged deeper into the story, watching Mars Girl interrupt a gathering at the teahouse, apologizing abjectly. I knew the
kanji
for various apologetic words because I used them so often.

“Is it too much trouble?” I’d asked the girl in the comic book store. “Sorry, could you tell me where this address is?” I’d asked the woman in the coffee shop. And “I’m sorry, but I can’t guarantee that I’ll give you publicity,” I’d told Chiyo.

In Show a Boy, apologies between women weren’t routine. Chiyo didn’t apologize to the young woman because the Cowboy wasn’t available to lasso her friend, just as the young woman didn’t apologize for interrupting our conversation with her complaint. In the strip club, women didn’t have to answer to the language police.

***

The train had reached Zushi, the stop closest to Hayama. I readied myself to get out, almost wishing that I hadn’t departed Tokyo. If I’d stayed put, I could have zipped over to Nezu to see if the address Kunio had listed for the school was real, and asked around about whether the artist haunted that neighborhood.

A bus ride and ten minutes walk later, I did wish that I’d stayed in Tokyo. The lights were out in Takeo’s family house, and when I rapped on the locked door, nobody answered. I needed a toilet. All the sherry I’d drunk at Show a Boy was making me hop up and down.

If Takeo didn’t arrive home within the next five minutes, I resolved to visit the beach latrine, the fount of the thin, filthy river that ran into the sea. I would have to overlook the warning Takeo had given me not to walk by myself on the beach at night. “Why?” I had asked. With all the emperor’s police guards nearby, Isshiki Beach seemed a stupid place to commit crimes. Takeo had mumbled something about the beach drawing rowdies.

I walked around the property, looking for a way into the house. The walled garden was a place in which I’d hoped to spend more time over the weekend. In the twilight, I strolled the overgrown lawn studded with plum and mulberry trees trained into graceful shapes. In the very back was a small Zen garden with a couple of large rocks, a small stone lantern, and a small wisteria. The focal point was a raked bed of purest white sand, a very distant cousin to the dirty blend on the beach. Takeo raked the garden’s sand every morning into perfect waves, removing any leaves that might have marred its surface.

A pair of golden eyes glowed at me from the center of the sand, and I thought first of a demon before realizing that it was a cat. I looked at the cat but didn’t make any friendly sounds. Cats make me uneasy. I heard a rushing sound and realized that the cat was urinating on the carefully raked Zen garden. As the cat kicked sand to cover its doings, I felt my own need growing more urgent.

The kitchen window was open. I imagined that all I’d need to do was slide the light screen aside and I could be inside. The only problem was that the window was ten feet above where I was standing. I looked around for the ladder that Takeo and the roofers had used. Could they really have bothered to lock it up in the shed?

Apparently they had, so I gave up. I left the small bag containing the casual clothes that I’d worn earlier in the day next to the front door, with a brief note mentioning that I’d gone for a short walk and would return.

Then I set off for the beach, slipping out of my sandals once they filled with sand, hoping the damp feeling under my feet was caused solely by seawater.

The beach at night was a very different place than during the day. The families and Ping-Pong players were gone, but the open-air lean-tos I’d noticed before were filled with a mishmash of young people. Rowdy American sailors were ordering drinks with lewd names like Sex on the Beach for packs of single Japanese girls, Japanese couples were sipping huge mai-tais, and small pockets of Japanese men wearing sunglasses, tank tops, and tattoos were swigging Budweiser, a high-status imported beer. Some Australian men called out to me as I walked by, obviously mistaking me for a non-English-speaking Japanese. Usually I’d shoot something back at them in English, because nothing made a gaijin lose interest faster than a woman who could speak his language. Tonight I ignored them because I was intent on reaching the cement cesspool fifty feet away. I made it in, survived the stench, and was out within a few minutes. As I approached the bar again, looking for a place to wash my hands, I saw a slender girl wearing a bikini top and shorts, with her hair neatly pulled into two childish ponytails. Something about her reminded me of Rika, the intern from the
Gaijin Times
. When the girl’s smile stretched wider and she started babbling about the coincidence, I realized that the teenager
was
Rika.

“How nice to see you,” I said, trying to figure out how I felt. Seeing her smiling face reminded me of how I’d instinctively liked her. But why was she here, an hour from the magazine office, at a fairly obscure beach after dark?

“Rei-san! This is great! I heard about your weekend plan, so I decided to come here, too. Will you join me and my friends for a drink at the bar?” Rika seemed so excited that I realized that she was at least halfway drunk.

“Sure. I need a place to wash my hands first.”

“You can do that at the bar,” Rika said. “They’ve got water there.”

I followed Rika’s slim hips back to the bar, feeling somewhat overdressed in my sand-sweeping dress. The hand-washing facility she’d mentioned was the bar sink, a large standing tub with a hose running into it. Everything else in the bar was similarly crude. Lightbulbs hung crazily askew from the straw roof. There were a couple of large picnic tables and also some smaller tables that looked like the large spools for rope taken from a ship’s deck. Hayama was a few kilometers from Yokosuka, where the U.S. Navy had a shipyard. I wondered if the spools were recycled.

Rika was not with anyone from the magazine; rather, she was surrounded by a bunch of fellow Showa College students she introduced so swiftly that I forgot their names. There was a boy with a scrawny build, who tapped long fingers decorated with blue nail polish against the table; a girl with hair that was frizzy and green, the probable result of having tried to go blond with a cheap dye; and another male, who seemed unremarkable except for the fact that he was very drunk, sloshing beer across the table and carrying on giddily about how he’d surfed a ten-foot wave that day and almost been killed.

I looked out at the placid bay and shook my head. Some people jokingly called the water Lake Hayama because it had so few waves. The fact that Takeo and his friends had surfed there wasn’t very impressive to someone like me, who’d grown up in California. They’d wipe out the first time they attempted to surf at a real beach.

Rika poured me a glass of beer from the frosty pitcher of Asahi on the table. “Why are you here alone?” she asked.

“My friend had something else going on. What about you?”

“It’s fun to come here at night. There’s a very good
manga
shop that’s open late.”

“You went to Animagine, I bet,” I said.

“Yes. How did you know?” Rika exclaimed.

I could have said that Takeo had clued me in to the place, but I thought it would seem rather miserable to talk about a beau who had ditched me for the night. I said, “It’s near a French cafe that I like.”

“We could look together for ideas at Animagine, couldn’t we?”

Rika was stressing the idea of Japanese teamwork, when all I could think of was protecting my image. Trying to get into the share-and-share-alike spirit, I admitted, “I went inside looking for …ideas.” I turned my gaze to her companions, inspired by something that would bring them into the conversation and divert attention away from my project. “I was surprised by how many young men like to read comic books about schoolgirls.”

The fellow with blue nails shrugged. “Only lonely guys read them. Losers. There was one guy who became so obsessed with the idea of raping young girls that he studied the technique in comics, and then raped and killed some girls himself.”

I shivered. “So you don’t believe those comics are a safe outlet for fantasies?”

“No,” he said. “Why do you think so many girls get groped on the subway? It’s because there are books and
manga
celebrating that act.”

“Please remember, Rei-san, that sexual comics are only twenty percent of the comics market.” Rika appeared embarrassed by her friend’s lurid talk. “There are so many other kinds of
manga
that we should be writing about. There are series that tell fun stories about outer space, or cooking, or music. I’m sure that is what Mr. Sanno has in mind for the
Gaijin Times
.”

“He is giving you a nice chance to oversee that project,” I said.

“Oh, no, I am a very small part. But whatever I can do to help, I will.”

“Rika doesn’t know much about
manga
,” the girl with the harshly dyed hair snapped. “It is a good thing the magazine is published in English, not Japanese.”

“That’s true.” Rika looked glum. “I don’t know nearly as much as the others in the
manga
club. I’m going to have to count on them for help.”

I felt sorry for Rika, so I said, “Actually, the staff opinion is that Rika knows quite a bit. She came up with a very good direction for the piece I’ll be doing on the artistic significance of
manga
.”

“Have you found some good artists to write about?” Rika asked.

“I’m thinking about writing up a
doujinshi
called
Showa Story
. It’s a version of
Mars Girl
that is more interesting than the original.”

“I know it!” Rika said with excitement in her voice. “The artist graduated from Showa College this year. He’s called Kunio Takahashi.”

“Really?” Things were clicking together. Chiyo hadn’t mentioned the name of the institution from which Kunio had graduated. Now, the comic’s title had an additional meaning—homage to the place where the artist had studied.

“There was another boy from school in the group,” Rika’s blond friend said. “He’s American, and he is heavily into
cospray
.”

“What kind of spraying is that?” I was taking notes in my address book. I felt comfortable with the Japanese language, but ever since I’d started researching
manga
, I’d smacked up against a challenging new vocabulary.

“
Cos-play
,” Rika said in an exaggerated American accent, dividing the syllables and enunciating the L so that the word was understandable to me. “It means dressing up like favorite characters from animation series.
Costume
plus
play
. Do you understand?”

“Now I do. It sounds wild!” I raised my eyebrows. “Do you know the students’ names?”