People Who Eat Darkness Quotes

“By attaching a label to extreme behavior—monstrous, psychopathic, “evil”—and placing its perpetrators in a category reassuringly apart from “good” people, we could all worry a bit less about the complexities of human nature and the extent to which we might all, at one time or other, behave callously or without remorse.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, 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

“And then something comes over you, and then suddenly it’s as if you lift off the planet, and you’re far above, looking down, and you’ve got to find this person, like the needle in the proverbial haystack. It’s very strange. I could never express what that felt like. The feeling when you’ve lost something- that’s bad enough. But when you’ve lost someone, it’s awful.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, 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

“The families of the missing are doubly burdened: first by the pain of their ordeal, and then by our expectations of them, expectations of a standard of behavior higher than we require of ourselves. As humans, we seek naturally to help fellow creatures in distress. But most of us, whether we are conscious of it or not, expect something back—the flattery of helplessness and of need.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, 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

“One of the judges, a plump, rather young man who sat on the chief judge’s right, spent much of the trial with his eyes closed: whether he was concentrating profoundly, or simply asleep, it was difficult to tell.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, People Who Eat Darkness: Love, Grief and a Journey into Japan’s Shadows

“But someone went ahead anyway and asked the default question for such situations, the question that is not a genuine enquiry so much as an invitation to dissolve into photogenic grief: Mrs Blackman, how does it feel to be taking your daughter’s body home?”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, People Who Eat Darkness: Love, Grief and a Journey into Japan’s Shadows

“If you don’t have a strong family background, and you don’t have self-esteem, it’s almost a liability to be that good-looking,’ Annette said. ‘It’s difficult to stand up for yourself. You get preyed on.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, People Who Eat Darkness: Love, Grief and a Journey into Japan’s Shadows

“There’s a typical type. You have a father who’s a big success, a first-generation immigrant who got rich. But he’s a simple man – maybe he can’t even understand Japanese that well. So he wants to give his sons the best education possible. They’re given all the opportunities but still they fail. They take over the father’s business but, even with all their capital and education, it doesn’t work out. Because they’re not as aggressive as the father. They have the academic background but they’re not interested in real business, and they always have to ask for help from the father’s generation. And they still can’t overcome their handicaps. They have money. But their life is not fulfilled. Seeking support, being scolded by the father’s generation, their life is very twisted.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, People Who Eat Darkness: Love, Grief and a Journey into Japan’s Shadows

“Unlike a British or American court, where it is only necessary to prove the facts, Japanese courts attach great importance to motive. The reasoning and impulses which led to a crime must be proved in court; they are a crucial factor in determining a convicted criminal’s sentence. The who, what, where and when are not enough: a Japanese judge demands to know why. A detective, then, is obliged to get inside his suspect’s skull – if he fails to do that, he is not considered to have done his job.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, People Who Eat Darkness: Love, Grief and a Journey into Japan’s Shadows

“After a while, Tim and his helpers began to suspect that to many Japanese, light-haired foreigners all looked the same.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, People Who Eat Darkness: Love, Grief and a Journey into Japan’s Shadows

“The hostess club was both leisure and work; in colonising 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. ‘They are tired when they arrive and the last thing they want to do is flog their wits to entertain either a client or a woman,’ wrote Professor Allison. ‘The hostess solves that problem. She entertains the client, flatters the man who is paying, and makes him look important and influential in front of others . . . If that same man went to a disco, he would probably fail to pick up a woman and go home feeling deflated and rejected. The hostess clubs remove the risk of failure.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, People Who Eat Darkness: Love, Grief and a Journey into Japan’s Shadows

“The hostess club was both leisure and work; in colonising 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.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, People Who Eat Darkness: Love, Grief and a Journey into Japan’s Shadows

“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. Trial, in other words, brings almost guaranteed conviction: walk into a Japanese court, and you have the slimmest chance of leaving through the front door.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, 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

“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.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, 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

“As humans, we seek naturally to help fellow creatures in distress. But most of us, whether we are conscious of it or not, expect something back – the flattery of helplessness and of need.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, People Who Eat Darkness: Love, Grief and a Journey into Japan’s Shadows

“They said goodbye to Carita, who lay peacefully in a coffin full of rose petals, and watched her disappear behind the steel doors of the furnace. None of them was prepared for what came next.
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 ans 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."
Nigel, Annette and Sam picked up the bigger bones and placed them in the urn with the ashes. The bigger pieces of the skull went on the top.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, 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

“Nothing better caught the complexity of Tim's own character, his stubborn unorthodoxy, which to me was so likable and admirable but which to many people was repellent. Almost on principle, he refused the obvious point of view and the temptations of conventional morality. The high ground was his for the taking, but instead of marching ahead to claim it, he dawdled and skirted around it, finding shades of pathos and ambiguity where others could see only black and white. Onlookers were not merely puzzled by this-they were appalled.
Il Lucie Blackman's killing was not a straightforward example of good against evil, then what was? To be told by none other than her father that there was complexity here, to see Tim striving to be fair and sympathetic to his own daughter's killer undermined people's certainty in their own sense of right. They took Tim's lack of orthodoxy as an affront to their own. They identified him as a transgressor, almost a blasphemer, against acceptable ways of feeling.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, 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

“Lucie disappeared on Saturday, July 1, 2000, at the midpoint of the first year of the twenty-first century. It took a week for the news to reach the world at large. The first report appeared the following Sunday, July 9, when a British newspaper carried a short article about a missing tourist named “Lucy Blackman.” There were more detailed stories the next day in the British and Japanese papers.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, 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

“Even those we know best are strangers, whom we understand, if we ever do, intermittently.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, 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