People Who Eat Darkness: Murder, Grief and a Journey into Japan's Shadows [ペーパーバック]

I'm not usually a non-fiction fan, but I was completely engrossed in this book. Parry strikes the right balance by giving enough background information about the characters and events, and keeping the story moving at a good pace. His descriptions of, and investigations into Lucie, her family, her killer, the hostess community, and Japan itself are detailed and intriguing. His writing is heavily backed by research, interviews, diaries, and related books and newspaper articles, and this removes the sensationalist feeling that I think a lot of these books have. This feels like an honest account of what happened, but from many different points of view - the result being that that each different viewpoint paints a slightly skewed picture of the events, and the reader (and author) is left wondering who is telling the truth. According to Parry, the Japanese culture focuses largely on motive in these situations, and motive is something that Parry also chooses to explore in detail for all of the characters - not just the killer. However, the motivations of another person are, by definition, impossible for anyone other than that person to truly know - a strong point of the book is that Parry resists the compulsion to give the reader what he believes are the answers, instead presenting the relevant information to enable the reader to draw their own conclusions. If you are a fan of intelligent murder mysteries, court room dramas, psychological thrillers, family dramas, or cautionary travel tales, then you will definitely enjoy this book.

I have met the author a couple of times and lived in western Japan since 1988, i.e. throughout the period of the Lucie Blackman case. Until now I have frankly steered clear of this book, feeling it would be far too gruesome and unpleasant, let alone close to home, for comfort. I was therefore pleasantly surprised that the book is highly readable and by no means unbearable in its details, grisly though some of them are.

Richard Lloyd Parry has given us several things, including (but not limited to) the following: first, an image of Tokyo and life there for young expats which more or less conforms to what I had imagined as an 'outsider' who has only visited the Big Smoke occasionally and Roppongi only once; second, insights into the life and history of Zainichi Koreans from which group Obara came; third, a portrait of a typically dysfunctional British family marred by a divorce and the effects thereof; fourth, a sketch of the Japanese police which is critical of the organisation's procedures and inability to deal with rare cases but quite complimentary of individual officers; fifth, a window onto Japanese legal and court proceedings, lengthy, flawed and tedious as they are; sixth, detailed biographical portraits of Lucie and Obara, and many others, and some autobiography too as the author was caught up in the case and even sued for libel by Obara at one point.

The writing style is colourful and pacy, but also lucid and transparent. The analysis is penetrating and thoughtful, and carefully supported by detailed annotations. I particularly appreciated the refusal to rush to judgement over how any of the players in this tragedy had reacted to Lucie's premature death, in particular Tim Blackman's accepting the 100 million yen from Obara which did not affect the final verdict as to the latter's guilt. In the end the reader must draw his own conclusions about that, and about the whole bizarre case.

Richard Lloyd Parry's use of the "I" in his exquisitely executed of history of Lucie Blackman's short life, hideous death, and its baffling aftermath so impressed me that I've decided to talk about myself way too much in this review. Reading People Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman, unearthed a cache of buried memories, mostly comic and surreally vivid, I'd kept from my own time in late-nineties/ millennial Tokyo. Lucie and I had drunk at all the same off-duty-hostesses-and-the-guys-who-adore-them bars. She'd worked in a club just meters from my own. [The club where I hostessed gets a mention in the book as having employed much prettier girls than did Casablanca, where Lucie worked, and indeed, when we were contemporaries, I was prettier than Lucie. Now, however, that I'm in my thirties and she is still twenty-one, Lucie is much prettier than I.] Several times throughout my reading, I had to set the book down to wipe away my enraged tears at the unfairness of what was done to poor Lucie. Parry is masterful at rendering her humanity in 3-D. Through other people's reminiscences and her own diary entries, we see a vulnerable, nave, conflicted, warm-hearted young gaijin, trying, like any of us, to have fun, get high, and make money in Japan, while preserving some spiritual reserves for the real life to follow. The book makes me feel guilty to have two cute children--that's powerful prose.

Lucie met her murderer at the hostess bar, and was lulled into getting into his car by the dohan system [basically, hostesses earn bonuses by meeting customers outside the club], which was one of my reasons for quitting the "water trade". I never once went on a dohan and didn't intend to, so despite being the most-requested girl at my club, I still managed to piss off the manager with my indifference to the System. (At the time, that manager seemed a pure douchebag, but in retrospect, administrating a herd of obnoxious teenage girls who think they're God's gift to the Asian continent must be a pretty stressful job.) But why should I? I was Lucie's age, the always immortal twenty-one, and preferred to spend my dinner hours with half-Japanese male models, or a stunning butoh dancer I knew, who went by the rockstar-ish "Zulu". But while I lived on a generous taxpayer funded scholarship, Lucie was in debt and needed the cash. Oh, Lucie. The mental picture of the evilly senseless karmic trajectory from shopping a little too much (her debts were modest) to getting into sociopathic sadist Joji Obara's luxury car is like imagining a bullet leaving the gun's chamber to enter the heart of a little girl, and again, I put the book down next to me, and looked up into the sky with anguish, as though there were a higher power up there.

Parry lucidly illustrates the absurd incompetence of the Japanese criminal justice system without taking the easy and tiresome Oh-Those-Crazy-Japanese position. He patiently leads his readers through Obara's interminable, indulgent trial, all the while showing us maddening flashes of its corrosive effect upon Lucie's survivors. (In case any of you had not followed this case obsessively closely in the newspapers as I had, I'll not throw in my own commentary on Obara's verdict and sentencing. Parry's finely wrought true crime narrative offers delights of suspense and surprise on par with the best fiction, and leaves me almost envious of readers coming to it without any background or context.)

This version of the Lucie Blackman saga is demanding to be adapted for the screen. The gorgeous girls, luxe locations, palm trees, fancy cars, video documentation, dismembered limbs, funeral kimonos, yachts, and karaoke machines are crying out for it. Lucie's mother believes that her daughter is still with her in the form of birds, stars, and butterflies. I believe she's with me and every other gaijin hostess, current and ex-, as a martyr and savior, who died in youth, health, and purity so that we could age, get weak, and die.

Oh, and while I still have the screen, a message for the deviant Obara: YOU WERE RIGHT TO ASSUME THAT NO CONSCIOUS WOMAN WOULD WANT YOU. WE NEVER WOULD.