A while back on Tubi, I watched Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, a 2014 drama written and directed by David Zellner. It starred Rinko Kikuchi as Kumiko, an office worker in Tokyo who is 29 and working a dead-end job, who lives alone with her pet rabbit, and deals with both her mom asking why she isn’t married yet and her boss asking her why she’s still in a job largely occupied by younger single women. She likes treasure hunting, and finds a VHS copy of the 1996 film Fargo on the shore, and when she sees the scene with Steve Buscemi’s character burying a suitcase full of money in the snow, she thinks the suitcase is really there (as the movie had a fake disclaimer by the Coen Brothers saying that it was based on a true story) and plays the scene over and over, mapping out where the suitcase may be in Fargo, and she even tries to steal an atlas from the library, where the security guard takes pity on her and lets her take a ripped out page of a map of Minnesota.
She goes to Minnesota, abandoning her job while having the company credit card with her while running work errands, with limited English skills, and is trying to get to Fargo, with a sheriff’s deputy (Zellner) confused by her mission and trying to get her to understand that the film is fictional. Yet, she keeps going on to find the suitcase.
I really liked this movie. Kikuchi as Kumiko is a lonely character with mental health issues, and it’s sad watching her go further into delusion, but she makes her sympathetic and understandable. The story is based on a real-life story about Takako Konishi, a 28-year old Japanese office worker whose body was found in 2001 in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, ruled a suicide, and an urban legend said that she thought the buried suitcase in Fargo was real, but the story came from a misunderstanding between her and a Bismarck police officer with whom she had been speaking.
This film was really interesting, and I’m glad I came across it.
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