Throughout the book, the author refers to herself in the second and third-person, creating a sense of a semi-fictional world within the essay. The reader finds herself not just following along on Larson’s journey to understand Takako but also imagining possible pasts for the woman at the center of the mystery.

Fittingly, Larson softens the divisions separating genres by interweaving memoir, travelogue and screenplay. While unconventional, it works, and the result is a cleverly aberrant narrative structure dealing with the creative process and the difficult search for meaning.

A captivating blend of memoir, true-crime, meditation on women in film, and fantasy played out through the pages of screenplays that will never be completed.

If the book, like Larson’s journey through Takako’s story, occasionally diverges or becomes difficult to follow, and offers few concrete answers, it seems that that is part of the point..

In this disappointing debut, Larson charts her fascination with Takako Konishi, a young Japanese woman who died in Minnesota while allegedly searching for the money buried in the snow near the end of the movie Fargo . Though initially intriguing, Larson’s narrative remains emotionally distant throughout, and its stylistic gambits largely unrewarding..