People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo—and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up

by Richard Lloyd Parry

The argument of Nightwork was that, rather than sex, hostess clubs were actually about work. By encouraging and subsidizing the salaryman to spend his evenings together with colleagues, clients, and hostesses (rather than at home with his wife and children), Japanese corporations enabled him to discharge stress and frustration in a way that served the corporations’ ends—bonding with his workmates and building good relations with clients. The hostess club was both leisure and work; in colonizing the salaryman’s after-office hours, as well as the working day, the company ensured that his first loyalty was not to his family but to his job.

Christa had quickly discovered one of the defining features of life as a foreigner in Japan and the reason it attracts so many misfits of different kinds: personal alienation, that inescapable sense of being different from everyone else, is canceled out by the larger, universal alienation of being a gaijin.

The most mundane part of the day, the fifteen-minute subway journey to my office, became a heroic struggle to avoid assassination. It was laughably ridiculous and queasily alarming.

It made more sense to think of him as an absence too, in the way that sudden and intense cold is nothing more than the absence of heat, and blackness is the lack of light. Obara came like a blizzard of darkness and withered the lives he came into contact with.

This was his true measure—not a “self” that was available for scrutiny and evaluation but the effect he had on others.

It is exciting to imagine ourselves in extreme circumstances in which we are tested, morally and physically; in our own minds, we always pass such a test.