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Japanese hunting "Fargo" movie loot dies

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Anonymous

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From the Japan Today website

http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=news&cat=1&id=185547

Japanese woman hunting "Fargo" movie loot dies in Minnesota

Friday, December 7, 2001 at 09:30 JST
DETROIT LAKES, Minnesota Ñ A Japanese woman
whose body was found by a hunter near the North
Woods town of Detroit Lakes was apparently obsessed
by the the fictional buried treasure of the movie
"Fargo," police said on Thursday.

After flying to Minneapolis, Takako Konishi, 28, of
Tokyo, boarded a bus for Bismarck. Bismarck Police
Lt Nick Sevart said she stayed at the Holiday Inn in
Bismarck on Nov 9, and left behind clothing, saying
it was trash.

The next day, a man found Konishi wandering
around near the city landfill and Oasis truckstop in
northeast Bismarck, Sevart said. Konishi didn't
speak much English, so the man drove her to the
Bismarck Police Department.

While there, she showed police a crude treasure map
she had drawn based on the darkly comic film of
1996, in which a character takes ransom money
and buries it in a snowdrift in the barren Minnesota
landscape Ñ a location he marks poorly with a short
stick. The character ends up dead, and his body is fed
into a wood chipper.

Seemingly rational, she made clear to
non-Japanese-speaking officers that she had come
from Tokyo to search for the cache of money from
"Fargo," and she could not be talked out of her
project, Sevart said. Police tried to explain to her
that "Fargo" was only a movie, but faced a language
barrier. The department has interpreters for several
languages, he said, but not Japanese. Police called
area ethnic restaurants looking for a Japanese
interpretor, but they were unable to find one.

Since Konishi hadn't done anything illegal and her
paperwork was apparently in order, Sevart said
police had no reason to hold her. "She indicated she
wanted to go to Fargo. There was nothing we could
hold her on," Sevart said. Konishi apparently took a
bus to Fargo, then a 72-kilometer taxi ride to Detroit
Lakes, where she hitched a ride outside town.

"She apparently had money, so she wasn't in need of
a place to stay or anything," Sevart said. Bismarck
police didn't write a report because they had no
reason to believe anything was amiss, Sevart said.

"We've narrowed it down to a couple of possibilities Ñ
either a (prescription) drug overdose or an exposure
death," Detroit Lakes Police Chief Cal Keena said. He
said he was awaiting the results of toxicology tests.

"I haven't seen the movie," Keena said in answer to a
question about Joel and Ethan Coen's cinematic
"Fargo," adding: "I don't need to. I live here."
(Compiled from wire reports)
 
Is this another candidate for the darwin awards?
 
I can understand her believing that the film was a retelling of a true story. What I don''t understand is why she would think that it would show the actual location of the buried treasure, or give any clues to it. After all, if anybody living knew where to find it, they would have already dug it up. But the human mind is passing strange....
 
Yeah, the film claims at the beginning to be based on a true story, but this is one of the Coens' characteristic cinematic jokes. But of course Annasdottir's right... even if it was based on a true story, you wouldn't be able to discern the position of the loot based on what you saw in the film!

Was this woman mad? Or is this kind of behaviour symptomatic of a blurring of the boundary between reality and fiction in postmodern times?
 
Over the years, what really amazes, worries & frightens me, are the number of people who seem to live in their own imaginary world.

People, who find life so boring & mundane they live in a fantasy world of their own, which seems to eventualy take over their lives!!!!

I would suspect this woman is one of them, fiction becomes their own 'reality'.
 
an idea i was presented with yesterday...... If u accept that in everyday life most of the time we are acting in order to "fit in" or to produce "aceptable behavior"... that presoposes that somwhere there is a "real you"... Not only that but a "real you" that is wholy unaceptable to society. A "realy you" that would act out every beserka idea and destroy on whim...quite a thought ah..
 
Suicide in north Dakota

anyone remember the Japanise girl who froze to death in the woods of North Dakota looking for the suitcase of money buried in Fargo?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/fridayreview/story/0,12102,970841,00.html

She had been seeing an American Buisnessman called doug and after he left her she began drinknig and may have become involved in the sex trade.

She went to North Dakota because she had been there three times with Doug. She went thwere to kill herself.

The whole Fargo treasure story was an elaborate joke - if joke's the right word - on her part.
 
Midnight said:
How sad.
Click to expand...

How little the press where interested in the truth behind the 'quirky' story.

I actualy see something positive in the way she developed an elaberate myth around her own death.
 
The Virgin Queen said:
I actualy see something positive in the way she developed an elaberate myth around her own death.
Click to expand...

I don't understand, how is that positive?
 
Midnight said:
I don't understand, how is that positive?
Click to expand...

It's almost a final act of defiance, a desision to make her own life myth.

It's also incredably sad and infanatly moving.
 
I see, kind of like having it her way. Controlling even what people would think about it, as far as she could.
 
Midnight said:
I see, kind of like having it her way. Controlling even what people would think about it, as far as she could.
Click to expand...

yes. She may have killed herself over a failed relationaship but it would be an uneasy fit to describe her as a 'typical' victim.
 
In a way that's the saddest part, that someone who may have had such determination, (if we are interpreting this correctly) killed themselves over a failed relationship. Hell, I keep on going out of sheer spite sometimes. :devil:
 
Midnight said:
In a way that's the saddest part, that someone who may have had such determination, (if we are interpreting this correctly) killed themselves over a failed relationship. Hell, I keep on going out of sheer spite sometimes. :devil:
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not everyone's built the same way. Perhaps there is more to it than the relationship, other contributing factors. We may never know.

The whole thing will remain, to some extent, a mistory just as she wanted.
 
So I guess that's good in a way, if such a thing can be said.
 
im absolutely positive i heard this same story maybe 6 months ago or so. Maybe its an urban ledgend in the making ? wouldnt be the first time the press have picked up a f.o.a.f. story and run it without checking ?
 
zardoz said:
im absolutely positive i heard this same story maybe 6 months ago or so. Maybe its an urban ledgend in the making ? wouldnt be the first time the press have picked up a f.o.a.f. story and run it without checking ?
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she's not an urban legend. In the origional story the press went for the legend she set up to mask the reality of her own death without checking the facts.

There are police reports, eye witneses ect, ect all of wich prove her reality. It's her self concious atempt to make herself a legend that has survived and idf she does slip into urban legend then she will have acheved her aim.
 
I hadn't heard of this until looking at the online Guardian today. Her " cover story " was bizarre but the reality is poignant and, yes, inspiring in a way.
 
I don't think this ever played in the US. Anyone have a copy they want to share?

This is a True Story (2003) (TV)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0374278/combined

User Review:

In December 2001 the world's media focused on the small town of Fargo, North Dakota, where the body of Takako Konishi was found in the woods by a hunter. The media reported that she had left Japan with the misunderstanding that the Coen brother's `Fargo' really was a true story and that there was a stash of money hidden somewhere in the snow on a road by a tree. This documentary traces the background to the story and finds that the media, quick to jump on a `funny' story of foolishness, had gotten the story totally wrong.

Almost everyone who has seen the film Fargo will have also heard the story of the Japanese tourist who froze to death looking for the money that was buried in the snow by the kidnapper in this supposedly true film. Many of us will have heard this as part of the `and finally' or `isn't life funny' sections of the news - I know I did. However this overlooks the fact that someone did die, someone who had lived for 20 or so years until that point - even if she did die looking for money - it makes her gullible, but not a global joke of the day.

This film is immediately interesting as it looks beyond this story to find that this was not true. Konishi talks to a police man when she arrives in North Dakota and he mistakenly believes that she is looking for the money. However the truth of the matter is that Konishi had been to America several times in the previous few years and that witnesses who had given her lifts etc state that she seemed to know where she was going. A long distance phone call to Singapore the night before she died and a statement from her landlady about an American lover who had left her and moved to Singapore points to a more tragic and interesting tale.

This film builds the case for a young woman who had found happiness with a man in this area of America. A young woman who had been heart broken by the end of that happiness and seemed to be seeking some form of return to that feeling or closure by returning to somewhere she had been content for once. The film doesn't claim to have all the answers but does lay bare what it knows as facts - something the media never tried to actually do, they preferred the `kooky' story that it appeared to be on the surface. Interviews with friends and family and resident/officials of North Dakota who met her show that this is not connected to the film in any way and has been twisted to become a nice 3 minute feature on the news.

The film presents the story with a real weightiness that suggests it is more meaningful than it turns out to be, but it is involving because it has the respect to treat Takako Konishi with dignity and try to learn what she was about. She was not a kook or a film nut gone wrong, she was a person who's pain lead her to be found dead - alone in the snow from a mix of drugs and alcohol. The film cannot know what went through her mind but it can do a better job than the media. At times it's delivery is a bit poncey but it works quite well. Ohmori plays Konishi and manages to convey a form of silent personality without forcing the film out of the documentary mould and into a drama.

This film didn't change my life or have a huge impact - mainly because it isn't about wider themes it is only about one person. Konishi was made a joke out of - her death was a source of amusement and became an urban myth to be repeated as fact on the internet and throughout the media. Her story here is moving as it reflects a real person and not the image we have been fed by the news. Her story is sad as we know where it will end but I left the film feeling thankful that someone had honoured her life by at least looking past a 3 minute news slot and looking at a life lost and tried to understand why.
Click to expand...
 
I remember watching it on Channel 4, it was quite poignant. Maybe it'll be shown again on the new C4 channel?
 
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