Kumiko the Treasure Hunter – review

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In late 2001, Minnesotan police found the body of a Japanese woman called Takako Konishi in a field outside Detroit Lakes. This woman, who had suffered from acute depression, committed suicide after leaving Tokyo to embark on a journey from Bismarck, Minneapolis to Fargo in Minnesota and finally Detroit Lakes. Though she was simply retracing her footsteps from a previous visit to the US, the American press seized upon a certain piece of information from her death. It was speculated that she sought to uncover a suitcase full of money, planted by a man called Carl Showalter.

Showalter however, was a fictional character from the Coen Brothers’ seminal film ‘Fargo’, performed by Steve Buscemi and this apparent motive for Konishi’s conquest was a case of misinterpretation by a police officer, whom she encountered in Bismarck. Nevertheless, various press sources honed in on this detail, sensationalising it and hence, created the great modern myth of a Japanese Treasure Hunter, who could not understand western culture.

This legend became the source material for Texan director David Zellner, whose fifth feature length film ‘Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter’ is a loose interpretation of Konishi’s conquest, with all of the fantastical elements and an underlying theme of Orientalist cultural miscomprehension. The results are a spectacularly bleak comedy, along the lines of ‘Breaking Bad’, or Harmony Korine’s ‘Mister Lonely’.

We follow in the footsteps of Kumiko, a borderline catatonic office worker, whose traits are akin to a recovering Hikikomori recluse, as she finds herself incompatible with a normative life in Tokyo. Wracked by a fear of settling down with a husband, and utterly inept in her social and work life, she begins to develop delusions of grandeur, believing herself a modern day Spanish conquistador, spurred into searching out riches by a mysterious VHS of ‘Fargo’.

As a result, she decides to venture out to the ‘New World’, in order to acquire these riches, with only a hand-stitched map of the area where Steve Buscemi buried his treasure and an absolute conviction to succeed, having emancipated herself from her past. On this journey, she meets a handful of kind-hearted American characters, whose innocent accidental slips into racial stereotyping serve only to hinder her as she fights her way through the cruel frosty Minnesotan elements in order to reach Fargo.

This becomes an almost operatic struggle, starting out as a segment from the Bong Joon Ho, Michel Gondry, Leos Carax anthology film ‘Tokyo!’, before concluding as Werner Herzog’s ‘Aguirre, the Wrath of God’. Zellner balances perfectly the wit, sadness and insanity to capture this fantastical oddity, which explains why the story of Konishi proved so ripe for sensationalism. It is not the truth, but rather it is what a westerner wants to believe actually happened, as they continue to view far-eastern cultures as opaque, eccentric characters for their amusement. He has in effect, lampooned a positive form of racism, which is amusing in the moment, but highly thought-provoking and revealing upon reflection.

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