Lucie Blackman was deep in debt and her poorly paid job as a British Airways stewardess wasn’t going to get her out of it. And then the 21 year old heard about making big money in Japan as a hostess to Japanese salarymen: paid bar companions to talk to men, light their cigarettes, pour their drinks, and sing karaoke; there is no sexual component to hostessing as touching is forbidden. Attractive foreign women, like Lucie, are seen as exotic in Japan and even in the seedy Tokyo district of Roppongi you were safe (the Japanese crime rate is remarkably low). It sounded like a good plan, so she joined her friend Louise Phillips and set off from England in May 2000 – she would never return. Lucie went missing in July 2000 and her dismembered body was found in a cave on the coast 30 miles south of Tokyo in February 2001. How did things go so badly?
Reporter Richard Lloyd Parry, who covered the Lucie Blackman case as it unfolded, recounts her abduction and the ensuing investigation and trial in his superb book, People Who Eat Darkness. On the face of it, her murder was fairly banal by true crime standards: a random rape/killing by a loner murderer with a warped view of women. Lucie just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time – pure bad luck. But Parry tells the story so expertly – not just in terms of pacing and writing skill but also informatively – that the book becomes, as clichéd as it sounds, an unputdownable page-turner. I had three other books on the go before I picked this one up and all three got put to the side while I blew through it over a weekend!
Told chronologically, the book highlights several fascinating things alongside the murder: the complex underworld of hostessing, the storied racism towards Koreans in Japanese society, the very real and systemic flaws in Japanese policing, and how Lucie’s father Tim (himself quite the character) waged a calculating campaign to raise awareness of his daughter’s disappearance. Parry goes through each subject as they arise, always concisely and clearly explaining them fully, never dwelling too long on them, and effortlessly weaving it into the increasingly compelling narrative. It helped that, while I read the wiki article on this case a while back, I’d forgotten almost all the details, so I was constantly surprised at the many twists and turns events took.
Parry does his best to learn as much as he could about Lucie’s killer, Joji Obara, but Obara was an extremely secretive person who nobody really knew and continued to give up nothing of himself while imprisoned, so there’s scant information to be gleaned and Parry can only speculate on his psychology. Obara doesn’t appear to be insane, just an extremely sick individual. His wealthy family appears to be quite strange though Parry only encounters one of Obara’s brothers, who turns out to be an actual raving lunatic, while Obara’s father was killed in the ‘60s in mysterious circumstances (the implication being it was mob-related).
It was especially interesting to learn about the criminal justice system in Japan, particularly the absurdly slow trial process – I had no idea that it took nearly ten years to convict Obara; most high profile trials, in the UK at least, take a handful of weeks, or a few months at most! I was also stunned to discover the conviction rate in Japan is close to 100% which is just insane. As farcically incompetent as the Tokyo Metropolitan Police come off as, Parry’s observation that they’re simply inexperienced at such serious cases due to the rarity of them in Japanese society is a pertinent one. His summation at the end that includes the point that Japanese society is a safe one in spite of the police, not because of them, is a brilliant one – the culture over there is just so radically different from the west’s.
Still, it doesn’t excuse how poorly the investigation was handled. The police combed the area where Lucie was eventually found before but didn’t find the shallow grave, they gave bad advice in telling Lucie’s friend Louise to not speak to Lucie’s parents (for no reason) which led to severe psychological and addiction problems for Louise later in life, and, perhaps most egregiously, they had received reports of Obara’s drug/rape crimes before from previous victims and had ignored them – they literally could’ve stopped him years before he even met Lucie if they had done their jobs.
People Who Eat Darkness is a morbidly fascinating but undeniably enthralling read – astonishing information wrapped up in an unpredictable and constantly shifting narrative. I hesitate to even call it true crime as its scope is broader and incorporates sociological angles, but whether or not you’re a fan of true crime, I highly recommend this book.
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