Stranger than fiction

How a young woman’s disappearance created an internet myth and two movies, by Will Storr

During the second week of December 2001 an unbelievable story circulated around the internet. It concerned a Japanese woman called Takako Konishi who, under the power of some terrible misunderstanding, had travelled to the snowy wastelands of Minnesota to search for nearly $1million that had been buried by a fictional character in the Coen Brothers’ black comedy Fargo. David Zellner and his brother Nathan – both filmmakers from Austin, Texas – read about the woman in an online forum. “We were like, ‘Wait, what? Is it true?’” he says. “It had this timeless folk-tale quality. This notion of someone going on a quest, a treasure hunt, was something from the age of exploration. It was a modern-day myth.” The brothers became fixated on the story. “What in the world would make someone want to go on this journey?” says David Zellner. “That there were so many gaps in the story that made us feel like we needed to fill them in ourselves, just to satiate our own curiosity.” The answers they came up with were to become the screenplay for their sumptuous, strange and critically lauded new film, Kumiko the Treasure Hunter, which stars Rinko Kikuchi as a version of Konishi. Over in London, another film-maker was reading about Konishi in a copy of The Daily Telegraph. “Cult film sparked hunt for a fortune” ran the headline on December 11. The article beneath gave the bare bones of the story. The body of the 28-year-old had been discovered by a hunter in some woodland near Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, a town some 50 miles east of Fargo. She had apparently perished during her search in overnight temperatures of -3C. “Police believe Miss Konishi may have been confused by opening credits for the film, which claimed it was based on an incident in 1987,” explained the Telegraph. The piece quoted a local police officer, Lieutenant Nick Stevart, who had met Konishi during her stay: “We tried to explain to her that it was a fictional movie and there really wasn’t any treasure.” Paul Berczeller, a Baftaaward-winning American living in London, couldn’t get the story out of his head. “I thought, God, is this really a true story? I was fascinated by the unknowability of it. It felt so mythic. It made a huge impact on me.” Unlike the Zellner brothers, Berczeller wouldn’t allow his curiosity to be satiated by mere invention. He wanted to know the truth. He began his research for what would become a celebrated documentary, This Is a True Story, by calling the Detroit Lakes police chief, Kelvin Keena. “I asked if he had any records he could send.” To his surprise, Berczeller found he was the first person to have made such a request. “Here was a story that had been quite famous around the world for one day and no one had followed up on it except me. That really stuck in my mind. I wanted to do her justice.” The police chief sent Berczeller a huge file. “I got photographs of her body, toxicology reports, police interviews. I was quite thrilled.” He decided to use the information, and the people mentioned in it, as breadcrumbs in his own investigative trail. He recruited a cameraman and an actress, Mimi Ohmori, who would play Konishi. “I wanted to dress Mimi exactly how Takako dressed, meet all the people she met, shoot in the hotel room she stayed in. I’d do everything as exactly to reality as I could. It would be like bringing a ghost back.” And so it was that the actress, director and cameraman flew to Minnesota. Berczeller discovered the first recorded sighting of Konishi, after she arrived in the area on November 12 2001, took place on the outskirts of the small town of Bismarck, North Dakota. She was wandering through a freezing truck-stop in a short black skirt and thigh-high boots. An unknown long-haul truck driver dropped her at the local police station. Berczeller spoke to the sheriff there: “I don’t know why everyone’s so interested,” the sheriff said. “I’ve not even seen Fargo. It’s not my kind of movie.’” “But he could have been in Fargo!” laughs Berczeller. “He was exactly the kind of person that would be in that movie. Everyone I met could’ve been a fictional character, but they were real.” Berczeller’s breakthrough came upon meeting Officer Jesse Hellman, who’d spoken with Konishi for four hours. He told Berczeller that she was clasping what looked like