A JAPANESE woman who apparently set out to find one million dollars in ransom money depicted in the hit comedy-thriller ”Fargo” may have died from exposure, Japanese media said on Monday. The body of the woman, a resident of Tokyo, was found in the Detroit Lakes area of Minnesota on November 15, Jiji Press said, citing the Japanese Consulate General in Chicago and local press reports. A hunter discovered the lightly-clothed body of the 28-year old in a forest one week after she landed in Minneapolis, Kyodo News said. She had earlier been interviewed by local police after being seen wandering alone in the town of Bismarck, North Dakota. Unable to communicate adequately in English, the woman showed police a crude hand-drawn map which led them to believe she was attempting to find the ransom money depicted in the Oscar-winning 1996 Joel and Ethan Cohen film. A Japanese foreign ministry official from the division in charge of protecting Japanese nationals overseas confirmed the woman’s death, but declined to comment on the circumstances or identify her, citing privacy concerns. ”Fargo”, named after a town on the Minnesota-North Dakota border, is the fictional story of a faked kidnap that goes horribly wrong. It is set in the frozen wastes of the border area’s Great Plains. In one scene, one of the villains stops his car in a snowy landscape devoid of features except for a wire fence and fenceposts to bury a briefcase containing almost one million dollars. The film opens with the statement: ”This is a true story. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987,” a statement now celebrated as a cinematic joke. ”For the record, no Twin Cities dealers’ wives have been kidnapped and killed in Brainerd (a town in Minnesota where most of the film is set)… no one has been axed to death, dismembered and fed into a wood chipper,” the website of the Brainerd Daily Dispatch states, referring to the film’s gruesome plot. – Sapa-AFP