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

Lucie emerges from the bathroom. What does she do next? I know that she doesn’t write in her diary, which has been neglected for almost two weeks. She doesn’t call Scott, her boyfriend, who

I like this jarring insinuation of a narrator

Akira Takagi.

Newly Risen Religion.

Rigby & Peller, corsetieres to the queen,

As of 2018 R&P have lost the Queen's business because of a tell-all book they published

Lucie had fifty-nine days to live,

“I caught a great deal of squid on one occasion, and I told her about it,” he told me. “I never heard back from her after that.”

“We talked about English history, literature, arts, authors, artists, the relation between Britain and Japan from old times, the similarity and difference of nature and mentality between both nations, and the sense of humor peculiar to English people that I like and respect most and so on.”

I mean, this just seems real doubtful? Lucie doesn't strike me as a reader

No other race has expended the imagination and creativity that the Japanese have put into the packaging of paid sex, a response to the country’s halfhearted and unenforceable antiprostitution laws. The only thing that is strictly illegal is charging for conventional male-female intercourse. Fellatio and masturbation, in all their forms, are permitted. Proving that any given orgasm has been brought about legally and manually, rather than illicitly and vaginally, is, of course, impossible. In order to veil the obvious, sex businesses package their services under a bewildering range of names, so numerous and fast changing that it is a struggle for the nonspecialist to keep track.

Korean-style massage by Japanese housewife.”

When you have to sit and smile politely while a man asks if you fart when you pee, and still smile when he says it for the tenth time, you get fed up.

“Scott will never know that we then engaged in one of the most incredible conversations of probably our entire relationship which made me connect with him more than he will ever realise.”

They talked about her hair

On Friday evening, she sat in Casablanca with a Mr. Kowa, who spoke excellent English with a faint lisp.

Is this the lisp guy Christa meets?

Years later, I asked Tim about that moment. What was it that, after all those weeks, had broken his façade of cheerful calm? “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this,” he said, after a pause. “But the tears—well, we planned that in advance.”

He introduced himself as Huw Shakeshaft,

This is clearly a made-up name

Then there was the Mr. Kowa who had suggested a dōhan the week before Lucie disappeared. “Not Kowa,” Louise said. “It wouldn’t be Kowa.”

An elderly Australian dowser known as Mahogany Bob

Oh boy

Mike Hills’s arms-dealer friends wanted her to be found and sent home as soon as possible so that they could get on with their business.

Tim put on an impersonation of a Japanese speaking English.

Oh no

“When I realized it was all lies, that was my concern,” Tim said, “that this lifeline had been wrenched out of my hands. I wasn’t concerned about the money, or whether I’d been conned. I felt no hurt about having been targeted or being the victim of a crime. Those things weren’t of any interest or importance to me at all. The only soreness I had was the soreness of my hand, where this safety line had been wrenched out of it.”

Yuji Honda,

Might be that other guy, Mr Kowa

It’s difficult to describe—it was almost like a lisp,

Mr Kowa? Lucie met him before she disappeared

Early checks were run on religious cults in Chiba prefecture. (“There are so many, though,” said one detective. “We need more information.”)

opened it, as if cradling a baby. I saw the head of a dog. He said, ‘My beloved dog died. I thought you’d think it strange if you saw this body, so I didn’t want to let you in.’”

It is arguable whether one could ever tell Japanese and Koreans apart by their faces alone,

Successful pachinko players were not rewarded directly with cash, but with prizes such as cigarettes or coupons that they could take to a discreet window nearby and exchange for money—by this means, the pachinko parlors bypassed the legal ban on gambling.

“He was a very, very good singer,” Akimoto remembered. “We had a school festival in the autumn, and we decided to put on a show with a band, sell bottles of Coca-Cola from a stall, and make a bit of money. Hoshiyama was the singer. He did Tom Jones—he was superb! He was exactly like Tom Jones, thrusting his hips, the whole act. I don’t remember the song he did—it wasn’t ‘Delilah,’ one of the other ones. He wore a long-sleeved shirt, a beautiful shirt in some kind of black satin or silk. That was an amazing shirt. By day, he didn’t dress particularly sharply, but he had his own style and he looked good.”

And none heard anything of what must have been one of the defining moments of his teenage years: the sudden death in 1969 of his father, Kim Kyo Hak, in circumstances that have never been fully explained.

Here we go

Many of the rights regarded as fundamental in British and American justice are unavailable to the suspect in Japan—or, if available in theory, waived or ignored in practice. He has the right to see a lawyer, but the frequency and duration of the visits are decided by the police. He has the right to remain silent under questioning, but he is obliged to sit through the questions, which can go on for hour after hour through relays of fresh officers until the suspect is numb with boredom and fatigue. There is no obligation for detectives to record interrogations. Instead of a verbatim account, they produce at the end of the proceedings a summary (known within the justice system as the “prosecutor’s essay”) to which the exhausted suspect is simply asked to put his name.

An arrest warrant allows the police to hold a suspect for three days, but with the permission of a judge this can be extended, twice, by ten days at a time. The judge almost never refuses. For twenty-three days, then, a person can be incarcerated incommunicado by the police, without any access to lawyers, family, or friends, and without any charge being brought against him.

a Japanese judge demands to know why.

“When he was hospitalised from the traffic accident, he couldn’t drink alcohol through the mouth, so he tried inhaling it through the nose, which worked very well … He inhaled alcohol night after night and sank into a dreamy world.”

The point about the new names was that each could be pronounced to sound as if it were English. Joji: Jorj: George. Obara: Ohara: O’Hara. Was this, then, the end point of his journey through identity: from Kim Sung Jong, the Korean baby; through Seisho Kin, the Japanese-born Korean child; Seisho Hoshiyama, the Japanese youth with round eyes; Joji Obara-Ohara-Orihara, the ambiguous, unphotographable Japanese citizen—to George O’Hara, cosmopolite, friend to the famous, man of the world?

and Mitsuko Tanaka, the local housewife responsible for the national census forms, had great trouble extracting a completed form from the Obara house.

After it happened, we wondered whatever became of that girl with the long hair.”

Oh, you know

The one creature for whom Obara had a straightforward love was his Shetland sheepdog, Irene, who would play such a bizarre posthumous role in the case of Lucie Blackman. In his few public statements, Obara mentioned her repeatedly, so we know that her favorite brand of dog food was Cesar boil-in-the-bag meat, and her favorite snack was dried filefish. By the side door of the entrance to the Den-en Chofu house was a life-size statue of the dog, with bared teeth and a glistening ceramic tongue. He referred to her as “my beloved dog” and “beloved dog Irene.” After she died, on July 6, 1994, Obara preserved Irene’s body for six years. “With the advancement of cloning technology,” he wrote later, “in the hope of reviving the dog which I loved so much, I put her to rest in a large freezer. I also enclosed some roses and some of her favorite treats.”

issued a statement to the “reporters’ club” of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police

So much of this sounds like the tone of that fake Lucie letter Louisa saw in the police station

I am presently being held for paying money to prostitutes for SEX PLAY, which I like to call “conquest play.”

He would be criminally convicted of nine rapes,

Comparisons with the DNA from fingernail clippings provided by Jane and Tim Blackman confirmed that several of them belonged to their daughter.

HOW DO THEY HAVE FINGERNAIL CLIPPINGS?!

Kowa,

I! FUCKING! KNEW IT!

On Sunday the second, the day after Lucie’s disappearance, he had bought twenty pounds of dry ice from a dealer near Blue Sea Aburatsubo, as well as a large packing box; the following day he had returned to the same place and bought twenty pounds more. “Is it for a big dog that’s passed away?” the dealer asked, and Obara agreed that it was.

Those who had a dry voice were skinny, while those with a moist voice were fat.

“I like an ugly girl. Selecting an ugly one is part of my play. I like ugly play with an ugly girl.”

A few days later, he did turn up at a hospital in Tokyo, where he was treated for a rash caused by caterpillars.

Annette, like any mother separated for the first time from her daughter, worried about Carita. Her anxieties took the form of intense nightmares and, being interested in such things, she recorded the details over the course of several years. There were scenes in which Carita was attacked and violated; mysterious robed strangers imparted warnings of danger and tragedy. Then there was a dream in which Carita came to her mother and comforted her, and placed a ring on her finger. Annette wrote down these visions meticulously, and subsequent events would impart a terrible resonance to her dream journal.

Lots of nods towards premonitions and the supernatural

After a pause, they were led into a room on the other side of the building, and each given a pair of white gloves and chopsticks. In the room, on a steel sheet, were Carita’s remains as they had emerged from the heat of the furnace. The incineration was incomplete. Wood, cloth, hair, and flesh had burned away, but the biggest bones, of the legs and arms, as well as the skull, were cracked but recognizable. Rather than a neat box of ashes, the Ridgways were confronted with Carita’s calcined skeleton. As the family, their task, a traditional part of every Japanese cremation, was to pick up her bones with the chopsticks and place them in the urn. “Rob couldn’t handle it at all,” Nigel said. “He thought we were monsters even to think of it. But perhaps it’s because we were the parents, and she was our daughter … It sounds macabre, as I tell you about it now, but it didn’t feel that way at the time. It was something emotional. It almost made me feel calmer. I felt as if we were looking after Carita.”

“The police are experienced in persuading people to confess,” a senior detective told me. “We make efforts to let the criminal understand the consequences of their actions. We say things like, ‘The sorrow of the victims is truly deep,’ and ‘Have you no sense of reflection on what you have done?’ But he was not that kind of person. With him those tactics would never work.” The detective had no difficulty explaining this quirk in Obara’s character, although he hesitated a little in spelling it out to a foreigner. “It is hard for you to understand, perhaps. But it’s because he is … not Japanese.”

Courts in the United States typically convict 73 percent of the criminal defendants who come before them, about the same as Britain. In Japan, the figure is 99.85 percent.

Even the Japanese language colludes in this assumption. From the moment of arrest, sometimes before charges have been laid, a suspect ceases to be referred to by the conventional honorifics, -san or -shi, and becomes -yogisha. Obara-yogisha: not Mister, but Criminal Suspect Obara.

What was Obara doing with all those bottles of chloroform? They did not, in fact, contain any chloroform. Obara had emptied out the original contents and replaced them with vodka, and it was this which he held below the noses of the girls in the videos.