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Tuesday, May 17, 2016

The Treasure

It was a small headline that read,' Cult film sparks hunt for a fortune.' The newspaper tabloids reported the death of a Japanese woman in a field outside Detroit Lakes in Minnesota. She had reportedly been looking for a hidden treasure, depicted in the movie Fargo. I felt I needed to get inside her head and know what was driving her to search for something that did not exist. What were the last moments of her life like?

Armed with morbid curiosity and my camera, I set out to search the breadcrumb trail she had left behind during the last few days of her life. The first place I went to was the police station where a long-haul truck driver had brought her after she was found wandering alone by the highway. Barely clothed to ward off the cold of a Minnesota winter, he thought she’d freeze to death until she got some help. AT first, the police officer on duty thought that she was a prostitute. ‘No one dresses like that in that weather. No one sane.’ He said to me.

He had tried to talk to her, but she barely spoke English. The only word he understood, which she kept saying over and over again was –Fargo, Fargo, Fargo.

She had shown him a map with an X. He could identify some marks that looked like roads, trees, and a lake. Could she have been looking for the money mentioned in the movie Fargo? He tried to explain that it wasn’t real. That it was just a movie. But she kept insisting on being there- almost pleading in a language he did not understand.

He decided to take her to the bus station. On her way, she kept clutching at her stomach and said something. He suspected that she might be pregnant. Did she want the money for her unborn child?

It was important for her to be with her family in this condition. Why was this woman wandering in the streets instead? He told her to reach out to him if needed and asked her to go home. She walked away.

‘I shouldn’t have let her go on her own. Why didn’t I do more for her?’, he lamented.

Upon further investigations, I found that she had checked into a cheap motel nearby. I asked to be let into the room she was in. I lay in the bed she had laid and looked out of the window that opened to a parking lot and a neon sign. It was depressing. I gathered my things and went out.

I asked the bellboy if she had gone anywhere. He said that she had taken a taxi. I found the cab driver who drove her there and asked him to drop me where he had dropped her.

It was the middle of nowhere.

I walked in the cold air with the sound of silence. Soon, I reached the place she had been found dead. She had died of exposure. They had found her with her face was buried in the snow. A cold, lonely death.

The last person I wanted to speak with was the lead investigator of her death. He told me that she had made a long phone call before her death. He also gave me her last known address in Tokyo.

After a long flight, I knocked on the door of a two-storied house. An old lady opened the door. She was the landlady of the Japanese woman. I had a translator with me who eased me into the conversation. I grabbed at the bits as she spoke swiftly.  The dead woman was a country girl who had found a job in the city in a travel agency. Through her work, she had met an American gentleman who was in Tokyo for business.

The landlady believed that they were engaged to be married when her tenant lost her job. The fiancé left for his country too. After months of waiting and no contact from his side, the girl decided to go to America on her own where she thought he lived. In a town called Fargo.

Based on true events.

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