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

  You tell him you wish he was your lover. He tells you he would like to take you home. You say that would be lovely, but my sister is in town and I have to show her the sights. It is the answer he was expecting; he might well have been frightened at any other.

  The only people who did not understand and play by these rules were foreigners, Western men who were unable to grasp the Japanese obsession with ritual and role play. I remember a Frenchman being furious when his hostess wouldn’t go back to his hotel. “Why on earth has she been coming on so strong all evening if she doesn’t want to sleep with me?” he exploded.

  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. “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,” Professor Allison wrote. “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.”

  How did Western women fit into all this? The truth, according to Allison, was that they were little more than a novelty: “Japanese men certainly fantasize about sleeping with Western women, but the reality of having one as a real wife or mistress frightens them. We might intrigue them, and there is certainly kudos in having a Western woman on your arm, but Western women are known to have opinions, to be neither obedient nor subservient.” It was a fantasy that, by the consent of all concerned, was kept alive only for the evening and only within the club. And the club itself was closely monitored by a manager, waiters, or the presiding mama-san. “I cannot say that I enjoyed my time as a hostess,” Anne Allison wrote. “It was hard work, and a lot of the time it was degrading. 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. But I never felt threatened, I never felt compromised, and I never felt there was a situation I could not handle. And if I had felt in trouble, the Mama would have come to my aid. In Tokyo, even in its red-light district, I felt a lot safer than in New York.”

  * * *

  If the job of being a hostess truly was confined to the inside of a hostess club, Lucie Blackman would be alive. But it was more complicated than that. Once she had entered the mizu shōbai, a woman was subject to pressures and temptations that shadowed her life in Japan, whether she was aware of them or not.

  They were rooted in what was called shisutemu: “the system”—the tariff of charges and incentives imposed by each club on its customers and hostesses. At Casablanca, a customer paid ¥11,700 an hour, which included unlimited beer or mizuwari and the company of one or more girls. Out of this, a new hostess like Lucie was paid ¥2,000 an hour. For five hours’ work a night, a hostess earned ¥10,000; at six nights a week, this came to ¥250,000 a month. But that was only the beginning of an arrangement of bonuses and compulsions that were the heart of “the system.”

  A girl who had impressed a man one night might be “requested” by him the next; for this, he paid a supplement and she received a ¥4,000 bonus, on the basis that she was bringing in business. If a customer ordered champagne or a “bottle keep”—a personal bottle of an expensive whiskey or brandy that was kept behind the bar for his private consumption—the hostesses in attendance shared a commission. Girls were encouraged to go on what were called dōhan—dinner dates with men who had taken a fancy to them and whom they brought back afterwards to the club. They enjoyed an evening out with an attractive young woman, she got time off work and a free dinner, and the club got more business.

  Dōhan were not optional. At some clubs a dozen dōhan in a month brought a bonus of ¥100,000. At most clubs, including Casablanca, any girl who pulled in fewer than five dōhan a month, and fewer than fifteen “requests,” faced the sack. Securing dōhan, for many hostesses, became an obsession and a source of deep anguish. It was not just a question of agreeing to dinner with men one disliked. As the month neared its end, an underperforming hostess would go on a dōhan with anyone who was willing. Male friends were recruited to make up the quota; sometimes a hostess in imminent danger of termination would pay the dōhan charge herself.

  “In the changing room, by the toilet, there was a chart on the wall with everyone’s name and the number of requests and dōhans you’d had that month,” said Helen Dove. “You were really put to shame if there was a zero next to your name. I was so bad at it, I was always near the bottom of the list. I couldn’t be bothered in the end. I completely lost enthusiasm. I’d rather talk to the other girls than pretend that I fancied these Japanese men. I’d had only one or two dōhans, a few requests. It got so bad, I ended up asking my landlord if he could do me a favor and pretend to be my dōhan.”

  She was sacked anyway, the week before Lucie went missing.

  * * *

  In the atmosphere of competition at Casablanca, rivalry was just as likely to flourish among the hostesses as friendship. But Lucie and Louise got on well with most people. “They were very close friends. They did everything together,” Helen Dove remembered. “They were living together, they were cycling to work together, they’d socialize together. They got on very, very well. I found them … I don’t know … naïve, quite young, a little bit foolish, a bit girly. They used to kiss each other when they met, even if they’d only been apart for a few hours. I thought that was sweet.” Helen was struck, as many people were, by the attention Lucie paid to her hair and clothes and makeup. “I wouldn’t say she was absolutely stunning, but she had a vivacious personality that made her attractive,” she said. “She didn’t strike me as being underconfident. Lovely hair, lovely personality, lovely and tall.”

  Customers liked her too. “She was different from Canadians or Americans with big laughs, women who are too bright and lively,” said Mr. Imura, the squid-fishing publisher. “Her conversation was not over the top.” Mr. Watanabe, the Photo Man, was immediately impressed: “At first sight, I took in that she was from good family. She looked gentle, graceful, charming, and refined … I could really recognize her well breeding, good education, plentiful culture, and nice sensibility.”

  “It is obviously not the job of my dreams, but it’s so easy,” Lucie wrote in an e-mail to Sam Burman. “I am earning good money and it is so different from the UK. The men are so respectful. Obviously you get the odd one but so far I’ve met some really nice people.” “The odd one” may refer to the unidentified customer who had offered her the equivalent of ¥1 million ($9,400) to sleep with him. In the version of this story that she recounted to her mother and sister, she laughed the offer off. As Louise remembered it, “She was furious and asked our manager to remove him.”

  The hostesses were instructed to collect business cards from the men they had entertained and to telephone and e-mail them to encourage their return to the club. A few of Lucie’s e-mails have survived. In them, she strikes just the right note of chaste flirtation and noncommittal coquettishness.

  From: lucieblackman@hotmail.com

  To: Imura, Hajime

  Date: Wednesday, June 21, 2000 3:01 AM

  Dear Hajime,

  I just wanted to write to you to say “Hello!” It is me Lucie here from Casablanca. I was the girl from London, with long blonde hair who you got on so well with …

  It was so good to meet you the other night at the club, I really enjoyed you
r company, and like we planned would love to meet up with you soon for dinner.

  … I am going to call you on Wednesday between 1200 and 1600 so I can talk to you and make some plans to meet up. Maybe you are free sometime next week?

  Well, I have to go now, but I will leave you with this message so you can find some time in your very busy schedule during Wednesday morning, then I will call you Wednesday afternoon, to finally talk to my new special friend.

  I hope you have a lovely day, I know I will as I will be speaking to you soon.

  Take care,

  Lucie x

  From: Imura, Hajime

  To: lucieblackman@hotmail.com

  Date: Wednesday, June 21, 2000 5:30 PM

  Hello!

  Thank you for your E-mail.

  How are you, Lucie, a cute girl with long blonde hair, today? I always liked girls with blonde hair and also with short skirt. I hope everything is going well

  Which cuisine do you like the best, French, Japanese, Chinese, etc.? Please choose one of them and go to a restaurant for dinner with me? How about next Tuesday? Do you have time to do?…

  By the way, can you speak American English? I cannot speak Queen’s English very well, because I eat rice and miso-soup every day. I suppose you could not quite catch what I said the other night. But I could understand what you said. So please whisper at my ear whatever you like to tell me.

  Enjoy yourself your life in Tokyo, anyway …

  Hajime Imura

  The secret of success in hostessing was to build up a stable of loyal customers for whom the girl, rather than the bar, was the attraction, and who regularly notched up requests, drink commissions, and dōhan.

  Without at least a handful of regulars, it was difficult to survive. But Lucie got off to a good start in this respect. “I have a friend … who comes in every night in the last eight days,” she wrote to Sam Burman. “It’s excellent as he speaks really good English, isn’t that bad looking and is part of the aristocracy therefore ultimately is loaded!!… He said if ever I needed to make up numbers [for requests] he’ll come in any time.” This was Kenji Suzuki, Lucie’s most regular regular, her professional salvation and emotional burden.

  Ken was in his forties and unmarried. He had large metal-rimmed spectacles, high cheekbones, and a wavy fringe of hair. His family may or may not have been descendants of the old, and long-abolished, Japanese feudal aristocracy, but he was undoubtedly well-off. With his elderly father, he ran an electronics company, but by 2000 the family business was struggling. In his many e-mails to Lucie, worry and loneliness gusted through the façade of brightness and cheer. He spoke of anxious meetings with clients, grueling business trips to Osaka. Some nights he would be in the office until eleven o’clock, with a six a.m. bullet-train journey the next morning. Booze and Lucie were his consolations. “I did not explain to you my troublesome situation and environment for my business,” he wrote to her in his cheerfully inexact English. “You can imagine it is rubbish. I could drink around but I never became to SMILE until I met you, oh! what a poor guy, hohohohohohohoh.”

  He met Lucie halfway through her second week at Casablanca. Except during his out-of-town business trips, he wrote to her and visited the club almost every day. The crush he developed on Lucie—not even adolescent, but childish, almost infantile in its abjectness—would have been obvious from this attendance record alone. His e-mails spelled it out in cloying detail.

  “Thank you for your patience last night,” read his first message. “One thing that I can say to you now is that I will be sure to envy your future boyfriend in a Mad City, Tokyo.”

  The next day he was apologetic: “I was so drunk yesterday and always, so I want to chit-chat with you when I am sober and normal. It might be very boring for you, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.”

  Three days later: “I am interested in you because of being yourself. I know that you are the most CHARRRRRRRMING girl on this planet so far … See you soon! Kennnnnnnneeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.”

  Lucie had told him that one of the things she missed in Japan was black olives. On their first dōhan, they arrived at the restaurant, and a bowl of them had been placed on the table on Ken’s instructions. He noticed that the glass of Lucie’s watch was cracked; he had it repaired for her and gave her a Snoopy watch to wear in the meantime. “He is such a darling,” she wrote to Sam. “On Friday night last week he took me for dinner again and picked me up in his little black Alfa Romeo sports car and took me to a beautiful restaurant in a hotel on the twelfth floor overlooking Tokyo. It was fab. He then came to the club with me which gets me a ¥4000 bonus.”

  “Tomorrow I have to wake up in the early morning for the important meeting,” Ken wrote to Lucie on May 24. “However, I will pop into CB to glance at your face even I cannot chit-chat tonight.”

  Less than two hours later: “I guess it is too early for you to say that you promise dinner will not only be tomorrow night. Having dinner with me may be too boring or too disgusting to stand. Just I warn you. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.”

  A week later:

  To tell the truth, you have never left my mind even one second … Of course, I’m very much interested to get to know you more. However, I feel that I know you very well. Probably, you want to get to know me more more more ♪ How’d you like it? How’d you like it? Right? I strongly recommend that you should carefully do this nice man. He is sweet, smart and sexy, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha , , , , ,

  And on June 5:

  Dear my sweet friend Lucie,

  You saved my life. I have just come from the heavy and shit (Wooooops) meetings today. Although it is Monday, I am almost feeling today is Thursday. My tank for jokes (other people say a “brain”) is dying. Today in some way it is very exciting but exhausted. In the early afternoon I climbed upto the top of Mt. Everest and in the late evening I was fallen into the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, It is not just a normal up-down in a day. However, now I am floating on the surface because your sweet mail like a life jacket … please forgive my written English. I am sure that you sometimes feel like corresponding with Papua New Guineans or a 7 years old boy.

  “[Ken] was wasted tonight so it was quite hard work,” Lucie wrote in her diary. A few days later: “[Ken] … absolutely wasted—worst night so far in my opinion!!” But she displayed little self-consciousness about the relationship. A man more than twice her age, lonely, alcohol-dependent, and seemingly without other friends or attachments was besotted with her. At a time of crisis for his company, he was throwing away thousands of yen to spend every evening at her side. Far from discouraging him, she was behaving like an excited, delighted, appreciative sweetheart. And this, for someone in Lucie’s position, was normal. More than normal, it was her professional duty. Hesitant, decent, infatuated, and loaded, Ken was the perfect customer. If she hadn’t encouraged him, she would have lost her job.

  Hostesses in Roppongi, the managers and waiters who ran the bars, even an anthropologist such as Anne Allison, all said the same thing: that hostessing was a game, governed by clear and binding rules, and that everyone—customers as well as girls—understood instinctively where the lines lay and when they were being crossed. But what if a man’s judgment became blurred by loneliness or drink or love or lust? What if one side stopped recognizing the rules?

  “I do not agree that I am a mad man, but many people say so,” Kenji Suzuki wrote. “Alright. Even if I am mad, I were not mad with you last night at all and will not be mad with you in the near future either. Do not worry! Probably, you will soon be mad and angry with me sometimes.….. Hahahahahahahhaha.”

  6. TOKYO IS THE EXTREME LAND

  “During this time between arriving in Tokyo & buying this diary so much has occurred,” Lucie wrote.

  20 days is all it has been. We arrived in a shithouse, but slowly turned it into our home. We have survived mass starvation and drunk any weight that dropped off, right back on. We found jobs as hostesses at a club
called Casablanca. We have drunk more alcohol in the last 20 days than I have ever consumed in my whole drinking lifetime …

  It has been an extremely hard & emotionally taxing 3 weeks. Tokyo is the extreme land. Only high as a kite or lower than you can imagine over here … never anything between the two.

  Filling all of the next page, in giant, overlapping, individually shaded, graffiti-style letters, are the words TOKYO ROCKS.

  Casablanca closed at two a.m., or after the last customers had left. The girls would help them on with their jackets, guide them unsteadily through the leather-clad door, and trill their thanks as the elevator rose to meet them.

  “Goodbye, Yamada-san. Goodbye, Imoto-san. Please come again! Goodbye—see you soon!”

  Then they would slip back inside, change out of their dresses, and escape into the humid darkness.

  This was the moment, as the foreign hostesses were emerging from their clubs, that the Roppongi night turned on a pivot. There was a clear and inescapable choice. If you went home at this point, you would wake up tomorrow with something of the morning left—time to tidy up, go shopping, meet a friend for lunch. If you stayed out, you would be drinking until dawn. “There’s no such thing as just one drink in Roppongi,” the foreign investment bankers used to say, and Lucie knew the truth of this. “Last week was a bit mad,” she wrote to Sam. “For some reason I got plastered every night from Wednesday onwards. You get so many drinks bought for you after work, and as work doesn’t ever end before 2 really before you know it it’s 7 a.m. daylight and you’re falling round the streets of Tokyo. The bars here are very cool, you just can’t help it.”

  There was Geronimo on Roppongi Crossing—cramped, raucous, and decorated with the severed ends of expensive silk ties, chopped off and presented as offerings by drunken bankers. There was Castillo, with its sign banning Iranians and its renowned DJ, Aki, who had an unmatched collection of records of the 1980s. Wall Street had a screen above the bar displaying stock prices; Gaspanic was the sweatiest and most carnal of them all, a grope pit of booze and dancing. The most popular place among the hostesses was the Tokyo Sports Cafe, which had the same management as the strip clubs Seventh Heaven and Private Eyes, and the One Eyed Jack’s hostess bar next door. At this time of night, a group of hostesses rarely had to wait long for someone to buy their drinks. In the Sports Cafe, as in the clubs, they were paid a percentage on wine and champagne purchased by male friends. After being sacked by Casablanca, this was how Helen Dove made a living for a while—lingering in the Sports Cafe, making a ¥8,000-a-night commission on the drinks men bought for her.