People Who Eat Darkness
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* For a fuller account of the publication of The Truth About the Lucie Case, see pp. 448–49.
*The Truth About the Lucie Case (pp. 751–52) refers to various former teachers who “doted” on Obara, but none was ever called in his defense. In particular, “Professor Emeritus Sekiguchi” of Keio University is described as having been “shocked” at the news of Obara’s arrest. Unfortunately, the professor died shortly before his former student was charged.
* Other taboos include the power of organized crime and the ultranationalist far right, and the Imperial Family and its role.
* The most notorious such case was the “Wakayama curry killings.” In 1998, two adults and two children died after consuming curry served at a village festival in Wakayama prefecture. A forty-seven-year-old woman, Masumi Hayashi, was eventually sentenced to death for the murders, after traces of arsenic were found in her home. Hayashi insisted that the poison was the residue of a pest-control business once operated by her husband. No one saw her lacing the curry, and the prosecutors failed to adduce a convincing motive for the indiscriminate killings.
* In fact, a single legal avenue remained open: a retrial. Obara’s lawyers argued that there was new evidence that had not been heard in the lower courts. But all of this had already been submitted to, and rejected by, the supreme court. As a means of winning Obara’s freedom, retrial appeared to be a theoretical possibility only.