Kumiko
Kumiko
WHAT WOULD IT
take for you to leave home when you’re seventeen ... go where no one knows you, in an entirely different country with a totally different language … for the rest of your life?
Meet Kumiko.
I married her sister.
In retrospect, I think it was all according to plan … Kumiko’s plan.
She ended up spending a week in my one-room renovated 1950s Hawaiian hotel/condo via a friend of a friend.
Elaine -- the proverbial girl next door -- had a boyfriend, Neil, who rented a cabin that he had built, out to tourists. Kumiko was one of his unfortunate guests -- unfortunate because he had somehow managed to double-book the last week of her stay.
Neil asked Elaine for suggestions. She suggested me.
The rest, as they say, is history.
* * *
I leave a key with Elaine to let Kumiko in while I’m out. That same day I come home to --
a clean house,
laundry washed and folded,
dishes done,
with the table set for two and a hot meal waiting for me,
bed made with fresh sheets turned down …
Kumiko has a way of ingratiating herself.
During a delicious supper we trade histories.
When she hears I know how to do Lomi Lomi (Hawaiian massage), she asks if I would give her one after supper. This requires tipping the double bed up into a makeshift Murphy bed to make room for the massage table.
Not waiting for me to explain draping options, Kumiko strips down to her birthday suit and hops up on the table, face-down in anticipation.
I bring some towels anyway.
Lomi Lomi, if done right, is very relaxing. Kumiko is murmuring appropriately. It’s hard to understand someone whose cheeks are compressed in a foam ring. Double it and add thirty for someone whose English is definitely a second language and there’s more than enough room for misunderstandings.
Kumiko mumbles something.
I stop long enough to ask her to repeat it.
“You could rape me and I wouldn’t tell,” she says, having lifted her head out of the foam headrest for clarity.
“Excuse me?” I say, thinking maybe I don't understand the context of her message.
“I said, you could rape me and I won’t tell.”
This option is not in my Lomi Lomi manual. I’m not sure what she’s proposing. It sounds like some kind of invitation or offer.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I appreciate the offer … I think. But that’s not something I would be comfortable with.”
No response.
After an awkward silence, I resume the massage. The rest of it continues without incident. Nothing is mentioned thereafter by me or her regarding her invite.
The next night she asks if I can “do her” again. I’m a little apprehensive, but I do
need to log 500 hours of massage before I can qualify for a massage license.
All goes well for about 45 minutes. She’s at this point face up on the table, eyes closed, arms by her side. As I work on her shoulders, she bolts upright on the table, bracing herself with both hands behind her, uttering loud guttural sounds like some kind of wounded animal. It’s after nine at night. These blood-curdling screams might draw unwanted attention from neighbors. I’m more concerned for her.
“What’s wrong?!” I shout, stopping for a reply.
“Don’t stop me. I have to do this,” is her cryptic response.
Thirty seconds later she’s quieted down and lays back on the table.
I finish the massage, but have my reservations about any future sessions …
The rest of the week is uneventful.
Kumiko continues to make herself useful.
At the end of the week she thanks me for letting her stay and flies back to New York.
* * *
Six months later, I get a call.
It’s Kumiko.
She’s in Japan.
She says, “I just want to thank you for what you did for me.”
I say, “You’re welcome,” not exactly knowing what it is that she could possibly be referring to …
* * *
A year later, she brings her two sons and her sister, Mariko, to stay at Neil’s cabin. He’s functioning as their defacto tour guide, but is running short on things to do.
Again he consults with Elaine. Again she refers him to me.
Kumiko’s sons -- Yuga and Jingo -- are 12 and 14. Guns are pretty much illegal in Japan, although these boys have grown up in New York. On Oahu I had seen indoor shooting ranges that advertised heavily to the Japanese.
There’s a range on Kauai. I think maybe they would like a chance to shoot a .22.
Kumiko looks worried, but goes along with it.
Mariko tells me later that their father committed suicide with a .22 pistol in their living room three years ago …
Who knew.
The boys fly back to New York before Neil mentions in passing that he’s managed to double book the cabin (again?!) for the remaining two weeks of Mariko’s and Kumiko’s stay.
Kumiko asks if they can stay with me.
In retrospect I wonder if the whole thing is a set-up.
I take Mariko shopping at the kiosks at Spouting Horn -- a tourist trap on Kauai where ocean waves slam into a cave-like rock formation creating sprays up to 100 feet. The dirty little secret is the original Spouting Horn was destroyed by one of the hurricanes that routinely plague the Island. The Army Corps of Engineers took it upon themselves to -- in the words of Steve Austin’s handler on The Six Million Dollar Man
-- “make it better than it was.”
If you want to impress a girl from Japan, spend three hours with her while she shops for souvenirs. Japanese tourists are duty-bound to buy something special for virtually every relative and acquaintance they know whenever they travel. Apparently Japanese husbands and/or boyfriends don’t have much patience for this tradition …
Mariko is duly impressed.
Kumiko seems always to be on the lookout for alternative healing practices. Kauai is reputed -- like Mount Shasta -- to be one of those spiritually-concentrated spots. It boasts the largest natural crystal anywhere.
One of the things Kumiko discovers on Kauai, of all places, is an honest-to-goodness (honest Injun) sweat lodge, complete with an authentic imported Indian chief specifically flown over for the occasion.
I drive her and Mariko to the sweat.
Figuring I have science on my side, I drench a towel in ice-cold water before going into the tent.
The air is super hot -- that’s before the crusty-looking chief starts pouring water on hot rocks inducing sizzling clouds of steam on top of steam. I smugly put my face in my cool towel leaving an opening just big enough to breathe.
Within a matter of minutes my ploy fizzles (sizzles?). After absorbing enough steam to neutralize the cooling effects of the water, the towel becomes hotter than the air around it!
I don’t stick around long enough to work out the thermodynamics. I crawl out a full hour before the rest of the sweaty tribe, who apparently are no worse for wear.
The next day, Kumiko asks if I know of any secluded beaches. It happens there are several -- one that can only be accessed by walking a mile on razor-sharp volcanic rocks nearly eighty feet above sea level. A slightly-used path then takes you down through some trees to an isolated, crescent-shaped beach with a forty-foot high sand dune doubling as the beach.
Once there, Kumiko asks if I would dig a hole about five feet deep. As I dig, she takes off all her clothes. Mariko seems content to be an innocent bystander.
When the hole is finished, Kumiko climbs in, puts her arms down by her sides and asks me to fill it in up to her neck.
I do.
She closes her eyes and there we sit for the next two hours -- I guess Kumiko is technically standing … So much for alternative healing techniques …
Mariko would later want to do the same. Being “exposed” to other cultures takes on new meaning ...
Mariko has to fly back to Japan.
Kumiko stays one more week.
I have clients in Princeville on the north shore. There’s a nice spa on the way up.
I suggest to Kumiko that I drop her off on the way up, then pick her up on the way back.
It doesn’t take long for her to make new friends -- one in particular is Sage -- a hippie-type who harvests Noni fruit to make into juice to sell at the local farmers’ markets. Noni juice is somewhat akin to snake oil, in that it purports to cure whatever ails you. I don’t know whether it’s the juice or the hippie lifestyle -- or both -- that attracts her.
Suffice it to say, she calls me right after I drop her off one day, saying she’s staying overnight with a friend. Says he’ll bring her back the following day.
* * *
The next morning I get a call from Sage.
“Have you seen Kumiko?”
“No -- I thought she was with you.”
“She was. But I had to go pick Noni fruit. She was going to help me prepare it for the market when I got back. I left her at the house around 8:30. When I got back around 10:00, she was gone. Her things are still at the house, including her purse, but she’s nowhere to be found. There’s a beach towel down by the ocean. The neighbors say they saw her with it earlier. I was hoping she got a ride with someone and was with you.”
“No. If you need help looking, I can be there in an hour and a half,” I offer.
Let me check a few places first,” Sage says.
My next call is to Japan …
Mariko books the next available flight. Kumiko’s live-in boyfriend, Robert, flies in from New York.
To their credit, the police take the case seriously. A serial murderer is running around loose on Kauai. Three women have already been assaulted -- two are dead. The third managed to fend him off with a garden hoe. All three had been alone, were of slight build and were of Asian descent.
Kumiko fits the profile.
In all, forty-two detectives are assigned to the case.
Airplanes and helicopters search from the sky.
Three separate dog teams cover the beach.
Scuba divers search the ocean.
Airports and shipping options are put on notice.
When Mariko arrives, we immediately start posting “Missing” posters all over the north shore with a recent picture of Kumiko -- but to no avail.
After six weeks, we give up.
Kumiko will remain a missing person for the next seven years. Even then, she will only be declared legally dead.
* * *
A few interesting facts surface between the investigators’ reports and what Mariko tells me.
From police files I learn that Kumiko has been quite active sexually during the weeks since her kids flew back to New York. Not only has she been active with Hippie Friend, apparently she’s also been active with a tennis pro from one of the major hotels, as well as the boyfriend of the girl next door.
Mariko informs me that most likely the reason Kumiko called me from Japan was to thank me for making it possible through that weird Lomi Lomi session to trust men again.
She had been married for several years to the Japanese chef at her first restaurant in New York. During that time, whenever he wanted to have sex, if she refused, he would threaten to kill himself. He slept with a .22 pistol under his pillow. They slept with a Samurai sword mounted over the headboard.
After their divorce, he continued to call her, trying to get back together. One night she came home around midnight after a long day at work, only to find him in her living room toying with his silver .22 pistol.
“We need to get back together tonight,” he said, by way of greeting. “You’re gonna take me back or I’m gonna kill myself.”
“Whatever,” she said. “I haven’t eaten all day. I’m gonna make a sandwich. You want anything?”
As she entered the kitchen, she heard the gun go off. Her two boys came down the stairs to find their father bleeding all over the rug.
Mariko told me the reason Kumiko kept coming back to Kauai was to desperately find a cure for what her doctors in New York said was terminal. Each night Kumiko would go into the bathroom and spit up a cup of bright red blood. That explained the sweat lodges, sand treatments and Noni juice.
Kumiko told Mariko she wanted four things before she died:
She wanted Robert, her boyfriend, to find work.
She wanted him to agree to raise her boys until they were 18 if she died.
She wanted to find someone to take care of Mariko.
And, she wanted to love a man without fear.
When Mariko told me this, it went a long way towards explaining why Kumiko had been lobbying so hard for Mariko and me to become an item -- so insistently so that we both had to tell her to back off …
Robert called to say that he had found work.
He agreed to take care of her boys.
Mariko and I were now an item.
Apparently she loved several men without fear.
So what happened?
The place where she was last seen is known as “Baby Beach” -- it’s traditionally the place where Hawaiians go to leave this earth.
Kumiko did not swim. She normally wouldn’t even put a foot in the water. There were no reports of rough waves that could have swept her into the sea from thirty feet back on the shore.
The reason this was the drop-off place for Hawaiians who felt, for whatever reason, that their time had come, is because there are swift currents less than twenty feet out -- an undertow of sorts that swiftly carries whatever is in the current out to deep drop-offs infested with barracuda. They leave no trace.
Not the most pleasant way to go
What could possibly be her logic?
As she explained it to Mariko before she flew back to Japan:
Due to their father’s death, each boy received roughly $500 a month from his Social Security benefits.
If she died, somehow they would lose his benefits, replaced with what amounted to her own death benefit -- substantially lower than their dad’s.
But if she became a missing person, they would not only continue to get their dad’s death benefit, but an additional missing-person’s benefit courtesy of their mother having gone missing. Both of these would continue until their respective 18th birthdays or her body was found, whichever came first.
In typical shrewd Japanese thinking, Kumiko -- I believe -- planned this out to a “T.”
She knew she was going to die one way or the other.
Modern medicine didn’t seem to be effective.
Nor the alternatives.
While she could still manage, she got her boyfriend to commit to raising her sons.
The older one -- Jingo -- wasn’t talking to her anyway. He held her responsible for his dad’s death because she refused to take him back.
That didn’t stop her from planning the best financial future for him that she could.
She encouraged her boyfriend to find work that could sustain the family in addition to the Social Security checks, which, if she executed her plan correctly, would not only continue, but increase. Her house was bought and paid for. The only expenses were taxes, maintenance and utilities.
She arranged for Mariko and me to get to know each other -- even more so when we spent almost every waking hour together for six weeks looking for her. The fact that I can say “Mariko and I” in the same sentence suggests Kumiko’s plan to find someone for her sister materialized.
She satisfied herself that she was at least cured of her fear of intimacy with men.
Having learned from Sage where Hawaiians dispatch themselves, she took the first opportunity to wade out into the ocean off Baby Beach, completing her plan and sealing her fate.
* * *
Yuga and Jingo are now both in college.
Mariko and I attended Kumiko’s boyfriend, Robert’s, wedding in Ithaca, New York.
He runs his own company now, making soup for high-end restaurants throughout the city.
As far as the Kauai Police Department is concerned, Kumiko’s case remains open and unsolved.