People Who Eat Darkness - by Richard Lloyd Parry

My interest in Japanese comics has clearly shown me to be a Japano-phile, so it's no wonder that I started reading (actually, listening to) this (audio)book as soon as I heard it's about a British girl who went missing in Tokyo in 2000 while working as a hostess. It's a non-fiction in the true crime genre, and I had never known that this genre could be quite so engrossing.

Lucie Blackman was 21 years old and working at a hostess bar in the foreigner-filled district of Roppongi, Tokyo, in the hopes of saving up money to pay back the debts she accumulated back at home in Britain. Before coming to Japan, she had worked as a flight attendant for British Airways. This fact gets mentioned mostly to establish her as a "legit" person, who had a legit job, who was not some drug addict  who met a predictable demise. In other words, she was not your typical "high-risk" girl in a vast metropolis, and I acknowledge that makes the tale more intriguing, and it also reveals the ugliness that we all would be less interested if she were the typical high-risk girl lost in sin city.

"Hostess", however, sounds a lot more shady than "flight attendant." It captured the Western fancy of all the unspeakable acts associated with the underbelly of a strange land in the Far East. Prostitutes? Geisha? Escorts? Take your pick, bu none can completely define the essence of this uniquely Japanese industry, where girls get paid for their company in a bar. Flirting, singing, dancing, drinking, and sex with middle-aged men who are often married, all for money? Different hostess bars draw the line at different places, and sex is usually not on the table (at least not openly), but it can be as sketchy or as harmless as you imagine it to be. And that leaves a LOT for imagination.

Looking for Lucie was such a painful process that tore her family and friends apart. With divorced parents who were bitter to start with, her family wasn't that together in the first place. The Japanese police seems like ... just such a fat wallop of help, neglecting important leads, confused, stuck, well-intentioned but bumbling. If you get to choose which country you go missing in, apparently Japan is not the place to go.

Lucie was found, 7 months later, dismembered and buried in a seaside cave, wrapped in plastic, head encased in cement.

The eventual arrest of the suspect, Joji Obara, was unclean and indecisive, none of the "You are the MURDERER!" thrill of Japanese detective comics or crime dramas or even CSI.

Obara, a wealthy businessman from a wealthy Korean family settled in Japan, denied everything, and the court failed, even at the end of 6 YEARS OF TRIAL, to charge him with Lucie's murder, but he did get sentenced to life in prison because ... HE HAD BEEN DATE-RAPING WOMEN FOR ALMOST 30 YEARS. And it's not even like he's a mastermind serial rapist who has been extremely careful.

Obara kept meticulous journal entries of his "conquest plays," which numbered in the hundreds, and even video-recorded himself in the act for most of the women he drugged and raped. He had a fetish for Caucasian women, and several foreign hostesses who fell victim to him had reported the incidents to the police over the years, but there was absolutely no follow-up. One Australian woman, Carita Ridgway, fell ill due to liver toxicity from the chloroform he used on her and died in the hospital BACK IN 1992, and still nothing. He wasn't even on the police's radar, even though they questioned him a few days after Lucie's disappearance because neighbours complained of banging and sawing noises from his apartment. When he answered the door, the police saw a disarrayed apartment where he was mixing cement, and there was also a frozen dead dog on the floor. Is that such a common occurrence in Japan that the police simply couldn't bother to be alarmed? I think not. The policemen were probably like, "OK, this dude is really creepy, but he said the dog is a dearly departed pet and he seems harmless enough, and I really want to get out of here, so let's just tell him to stop banging and leave him to whatever he's up to. I'm sure it's not like he's burying a dead human body or anything."

It's highly remarkable that while Western media and records identify him mostly as a Japanese businessman, the Japanese wiki page emphasizes he is Korean. I can't read Korean so I don't know what the Korean wiki page says. Zainichi (Koreans settled in Japan during the Korean colonial period) have always had a tough time with discrimination in Japan, and I wonder how many Japanese people secretly thought, "Yep, that sounds about right for a Zainichi" or "thank goodness he's Zainichi and not really Japanese" when they heard about Obara's crimes.

Obara still hasn't admitted he did anything wrong, and since Lucie's body was discovered too long after death, there was no viable forensic evidence to determine her cause of death. Unless Obara confesses, we will never know the details of Lucie's last moments alive, though it's easy to speculate that Lucie probably died from an overdose or toxicity of the date-rape drugs he used. All of his known victims survived their horrific encounters with him except for Carita, so killing doesn't seem to be part of his MO, and his inexpert way of body disposal suggests he hasn't done it before, or at least not many times. Which makes it all the more appalling that it took the Japanese police so long to find Lucie.

The book is fairly balanced. Richard Llyod Parry started living in Tokyo since 1995 and is the editor of the Asian edition of The Times. The overwhelming number of interviews he has done with the relevant parties ensures that everyone gets heard. It's not sensationalist, it's not unnecessarily titillating, but it can be very painful at times. Which, I think, is the purpose of the book -- to examine facts objectively yet still gain a tiny sliver of understanding into the pain involved in this heartbreaking loss of life.