Reel Bay
A Cinematic Essay
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Equal parts memoir, mystery, reclaimed screenplay, and travelogue, Reel Bay charts Jana Larson’s unusual journey toward understanding another woman's life.
What was Takako Konishi really doing in North Dakota, and why did she end up dead? Did she get lost and freeze to death, as some locals concluded, while searching for the fictional treasure buried in a snowbank in the Coen brothers’ film Fargo? Or was it something else that brought her there: unrequited love, ritual suicide, a meteor shower, a far-flung search for purpose? The seed of an obsession took root in struggling film student Jana Larson when she chanced upon a news bulletin about the case. Over the years and across continents, the material Jana gathered in her search for the real Takako outgrew multiple attempts at screenplays and became a remarkable, genre-bending essay that leans into the space between fact and fiction, life and death, author and subject, reality and delusion.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this disappointing debut, Larson charts her fascination with Takako Konishi, a young Japanese woman who died in Minnesota while allegedly searching for the money buried in the snow near the end of the movie Fargo. Regarding the 2001 case as the tragedy "of a woman... who wagered what little she had to make this trip out to the middle of nowhere," Larson merges Takako's story with her own attempts to learn whether the death, widely interpreted as accidental, was really a suicide. Using a second-person narrative voice that eventually morphs into third-person, while also switching between conventional prose and a screenplay format, Larson recounts interviewing police officers in North Dakota who encountered Takako soon before her death, and the police chief in Minnesota who led the subsequent investigation, noting that all, with little evidence, speculated that Takako was either a stripper or prostitute. Larson also describes traveling to Japan, where she befriends a young woman from Takako's hometown and explores the theory that Takako had made a suicide pact, but uncovers little in the way of hard facts. Though initially intriguing, Larson's narrative remains emotionally distant throughout, and its stylistic gambits largely unrewarding.
