Free The Floating Girl: A Rei Shimura Mystery (Rei Shimura Mystery #4) by Sujata Massey

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