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

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?”
    Rika shook her head. “Since college is finished for the summer, it will be hard to find them. If the American is in the foreign-exchange program, he may have gone home for the summer.”
    “There is a Japanese girl in the group,” Rika’s friend said.  “I think her family name was Hattori.”
    “Hattori Seiko-san?” Rika asked.
    “Yes, that’s it. Seiko Hattori,” Rika’s friend said.
    “Great,” I said, writing down the name. “I wonder if Kunio also engages in
cos-play
. I heard that he dresses in vintage clothing.”
    “He was older than me, so I didn’t know him well,” Rika said with a little sigh. “But I have seen him dressed that way. He does look very sexy.”
    How many times had women commented on Kunio’s looks? He really had to be something.
Six years your junior
, I reminded myself. Boy, did I feel old.

Chapter Nine
    The moths flew into the lights and were zapped, the bartender ran out of bananas for daiquiris, and the clock’s hands were edging toward eleven. Perhaps seeing the time, Rika reminded her friends that in less than half an hour, the last train to Tokyo would be leaving Zushi Station. After the blue-nailed boy whipped out a small cellular phone to call a taxi to get to the station, I borrowed the same phone to check if Takeo had returned to his house.
    Still no answer. I felt a mixture of uneasiness and something close to anger about Takeo’s absence and the locked door. I could walk back over the rocks to his house and wait on the doorstep, but I knew that if I was stuck there all night, I’d be very uncomfortable. As the taxi picking up Rika and her friends stopped on the beach road, I decided to do the sensible thing. I joined the group to take the taxi back to the train station.
    What if something bad has happened to Takeo? I wondered, feeling guilty as we ran for the last train at Zushi Station, Rika’s ankle almost getting sheared as the door closed behind her. But once I was on the train, there was no turning back. We made it to Tokyo Station just before midnight, making sprints in various directions to get on the last subway trains heading home. For a culture so dependent on trains, it seemed unfair that most of them stopped running at midnight.
    Life in Japan was challenging, and I knew that I had it easier than most people. Rika and her friends lived with their parents in far-flung suburbs, but I lived autonomously near Sendagi Station in the northeast inner quarter of Tokyo. It was only a ten-minute walk from the station to my one-bedroom apartment on the first floor of a prewar house. The flat had the stale warmth of a place that had been closed up for