Real life and fiction collide as 'Fargo' fanatic is found frozen

It sounds like the plot of a Coen brothers' movie. A woman from Japan is obsessed with a pile of money buried in the snowy wastes of Minnesota. She travels a long way to find it. Then, one bleak day, her frozen body turns up as the elements overwhelm her.

Actually, it is the plot of a Coen brothers' movie, or sort of.

Takako Konishi, 28, from Tokyo, was fixated on the 1996 film Fargo, the one where the ambition of a salesman leads to a string of violent deaths, and a pile of ransom money gets buried by the side of a snowy road, never to be found.

Ms Konishi was apparently after the fictional treasure. Last month, she arrived in Bismarck, North Dakota, and showed police officers a crude map of a tree next to a highway and mumbled incomprehensibly about Fargo and the money.

The police left her on her way, and nothing more was heard until her body was discovered in nearby Minnesota by a hunter on 15 November. She had probably died of exposure.