The Floating Girl: A Rei Shimura Mystery (Rei Shimura Mystery #4) Read Online Free Page A

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.”

Chapter Four
    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