Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter

Last night I watched the movie Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, directed by David Zellner. It stars Rinko Kikuchi as Kumiko, a lonely young woman living in Tokyo, where she works in a miserable office job and spends her free time looking for hidden objects with the help of the embroidered treasure maps she makes for herself. One day she finds a buried VHS tape of the movie Fargo. Believing the film's opening title card, that it is based on a true story, she becomes obsessed by the scene where Steve Buscemi's character buries a case of money in the snow. She sacrifices pretty much everything in her ordinary life to travel to Minnesota, with no money, only a very shaky grasp of English and completely unprepared for the Minnesota winter, to look for a treasure that, of course, doesn't exist. I've seen this movie three times inside a year. I don't know why I like it so much, but I do. It manages to be both completely devastating and strangely inspirational. When I met comics artist Emi Lenox last year at the Thought Bubble Comic Con we kind of bonded over the fact that we were both big fans of the movie and I showed her a comic I had made based on the movie, and she showed me some fan art she had made based on it.

It was a pretty long day at work. I listened to a comedy show called Domestic Science and a radio adaptation of Journal of a Plague Year from the novel by Daniel Dafoe.

I started a new comic this evening.