Reviewed by Travis McDonald

In 2001, twenty-eight-year-old Takako Konishi traveled from her home in Japan to North Dakota, supposedly in search of the money buried by Steve Buscemi's character, Carl Showalter, in the Cohen Brothers' 1997 movie Fargo. Konishi had spent several days traveling through the state and ended up in the Detroit Lakes area of Minnesota, where her body was found in a field by a bow hunter one morning in November. Curiously, two empty champagne bottles were found beside her body, though no alcohol was detected in her system, and the death was ruled a suicide because of the number of medications found in her bloodstream, including antipsychotics and benzodiazepines.

But the true story of her death was eclipsed by the urban legend that Takako was in search of the Fargo money. The legend itself was started by local police who encountered Takako in Bismarck where she showed them a crudely drawn map and asked them for directions to Fargo. This story was then printed in The Bismarck Tribune in early January of 2002 and captured the attention of several filmmakers who sought to discover why Takako would travel all the way across the world to search for a fictional bag of money and how she ended up dead in a field.

Jana Larson's debut nonfiction book, Reel Bay: A Cinematic Essay, chronicles the author's obsession with Takako's life and death as well as her various struggles with turning this strange tale into art. Reel Bay begins with the author, who refers to herself in the second person, discovering The Bismarck Tribune article and beginning her fascination with Takako. Larson, or "you," is drawn to Takako's story for reasons that seem almost beyond her understanding. She senses a "message" hidden in the story of this woman "searching at the edges of nowhere." She feels a kinship with Takako, formed by the author's projections about what kind of person Takako must have been: a woman in search of a different life. This affinity inspires her to capture that woman's story on film.

But it would seem that Larson never completed this project—at least, not as a film. Instead, what she ended up with, close to twenty years after discovering Takako's story, is Reel Bay. A chronicling of her search for who this woman was, how she ended up in Minnesota, and Larson's failures over many years to turn this story into art. Though the book deals with a mysterious death, this is not a typical true-crime thriller or memoir. Rather, true to its title, what Larson has created here is very much a "cinematic essay" that intercuts the narrative with old screenplays from the author's MFA days, aborted scenes from her Takako projects, and other scripted sections that take the place of the narrative voice. There are also several paragraphs throughout the book that discuss Larson's thoughts and critical insights about various, mostly art-house, films, such as Hiroshima mon amour, The Dreamlife of Angels, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, and Wanda.

More than just clever formal maneuvers, the choices that Larson makes in this book allow the reader a unique glimpse into the artistic process, a process that is, as any artist knows, often fraught with failures and self-doubt. Writing about artists creating art can often read like an accountant describing a day at the office, and that is why so many writers often choose to mediate a narrative like this through a character who takes the place of the artist but is not an artist themselves. However, in the case of Reel Bay, Larson's clever use of interstitial screenplays, as well as the second and third person, allows the reader to participate in the creation of this seemingly doomed project from several different angles—the way a filmmaker might consider framing scenes.

For example, in the beginning of the book as the "you" version of the author heads up to Minnesota to track down information about Takako, it is technically the reader who is interviewing the man who found her body, law enforcement officials, and other locals who made contact with Takako. But the filmmaker's eye is constantly interrupting, or in some cases propelling, the narrative with considerations about how to film these scenes or how the next piece of information reshapes the project. Takako becomes a constantly evolving idea in Larson's mind, and her desire to understand the real Takako inspires her to move to Japan in the second half of the book where she teaches English, tracks down more information about her subject, and spends a lot of time visiting Japanese temples.

But what are her ideas of Takako evolving toward? Every time Larson (in this section referred to as B.) seems to have a grip on who this woman was and why she ended up dead in Minnesota, Takako wriggles away from her, often inexplicably, and the project changes to encompass her new vision. An answer to this question is hard to come by, as Larson prefers to pose questions instead. But late in the book, she writes: "'I must be insane. I live my life in some kind of dream world, totally preoccupied with ideas and fantasies of my own creation. I can't explain why something captivates me or becomes the object of my obsessive musings. Fantasies and obsessions just appear to me, whole, and that's all. Rarely do I have the ability to see them objectively. When I do, the fantasy is over.'" This statement perfectly encapsulates the major theme of Reel Bay: an artist's obsession with a subject and her inability to make sense of why that obsession exists.

As Flannery O'Connor once said: "The writer can choose what he writes about, but he cannot choose what he is able to make live." Though it is unclear if Larson ever had a "choice" to write about Takako, what we get in Reel Bay is the author trying to make Takako's story "live" and all of the frustrations that come along with her failures and misunderstandings. While it's true that watching an artist continuously fail to create a piece of art over several years is not a terribly enjoyable experience, Larson's unique approach to narrative provides us with an engaging and rare opportunity to, not only observe, but become the artist in the midst of creation. For those of us who live this experience on a daily basis, this book might bring about feelings of frustration because of how true to life this narrative feels. But it is also possible that many artists might find a measure of comfort in knowing that they are not alone in their seemingly endless struggles to create a genuine piece of art. Regardless, for those readers seeking a look into the creative process, warts and all, Reel Bay will provide this and much more.