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

  • Caller saw a girl who looked like Lucie on 2 Oct at around 1 p.m. near an optician near Kinshicho. She was walking down the street with a man. He added that there are lots of indecent clubs/bars where Asian and European girls are working.

  • Caller said that he had information about a religious organization. Asked that a Japanese-speaking British person call him back.

  • Background music only.

  But for the first time since Lucie had disappeared three months earlier, none of her family was in Tokyo looking for her.

  * * *

  I lived in Tokyo throughout the Lucie Blackman time. I followed the case intently and wrote about it for my newspaper. I tried to answer the obvious questions put to me by my editors, questions that a British reader might ask, a person without particular knowledge of Japan. Some of them were settled quickly enough—about Lucie’s life in Tokyo and the peculiar role of the foreign hostess. But to the biggest question of all—What happened to her?—there was no answer. And, lacking one, people began to pose other questions, such as, Was she on drugs? and What did the best friend know? and What about the father?

  As a reporter, I moved across Japan’s public surface. By day, I encountered bureaucrats, politicians, academics, professionals; in my own time, I relaxed with people like me, who loved Japan and thought that they understood it well enough, even if they would never call it home. Roppongi was a place for occasional rowdy nights out; male friends of a certain temperament would go to the titty bars for their stag nights. Now, as a reporter in search of Lucie Blackman, I found myself visiting them myself and paying a tariffed sum of money for conversations with attractive, and knowing, young women. At first the clubs were alert and hostile to journalists—more than once, there were scuffles between bouncers and suspiciously nosy “customers” with notebooks and cameras. But the water trade quickly found its level again. Even Casablanca, which had shut its doors within a few days of Lucie’s disappearance, reopened at the end of August under a new name: Greengrass.

  I spent long nights there, or in One Eyed Jack’s, or in the Tokyo Sports Cafe, alone, or with a friend, pressing drinks on hostesses who knew less about Lucie Blackman than I did but who had all heard rumors: about cults, or rape gangs, or S & M circles. Roppongi, formerly so crude and neon bright, came to seem dark and damp and mysterious; creatures lurked beneath its stones. I would arrive home at 4:00 a.m., drunk and with clothes steeped in cigarette smoke, my pockets stuffed with napkins bearing scrawled notes. And in sleep, I dreamed one of the oldest male dreams of all: of being the knight who rides to the dark tower, slays the dragon, frees the missing damsel, and basks forever in the glory.

  At Azabu Police Station, I submitted to repeated fobbings off. At the British embassy, I was patiently told the obvious. I formed alliances with Japanese reporters, who would pass on what little they had picked up from the police in return for my gleanings from the Blackman family. I even mounted a photograph of Lucie on a piece of cardboard and kept it in my bag to show to people as I went about life in Tokyo. Everyone recognized the girl in the picture, but nobody had seen her.

  Even when there was nothing new to report, it was impossible to forget the case. People don’t dissolve into particles. Something had happened. So much information had been assembled—about Lucie, about Roppongi, about hostesses, and about the events of that Saturday afternoon. But at the core, there was a hollow, a gaping space. People hated the void and wanted it to be filled. They wanted Tim to fill it, with pain and anger, all the obvious and easily comprehensible emotions, and when he refused to supply them, they resented him for it.

  Nobody knew what fitted into the hole. And yet everyone knew. It was a hole in the shape of a person, the person who had taken Lucie and done harm to her. Everyone knew this, deep down, and they knew that the person had to be a man.

  I hated the duty—which every reporter must face from time to time—of speaking to the bereaved and scared, to the victims of loss. I was always afraid of getting the tone, the register, wrong, of appearing too cold and brisk, or bogusly concerned and sympathetic. I had to steel myself to call the Blackmans—Jane with her grief, Sophie with her defensiveness and aggression, and Tim with his intolerable helpfulness and charm. But by October, they had all gone sadly home, and it started to become possible to pass days without thinking about Lucie. And then one evening a Japanese reporter friend phoned and said that the Tokyo police were about to make an arrest, and that this seemed at last to be the man who fitted into the man-shaped hole.

  12. DIGNITY OF THE POLICE

  Christabel Mackenzie had come to Tokyo to escape, although not from any of the conventional hardships of the runaway. Her father was a well-known Scottish lawyer, and her mother was an academic at Edinburgh University. Christa was clever and pretty and grew up in cultured affluence; a life of upper-middle-class respectability was hers for the taking. But wealthy Edinburgh was smug and airless; Christa wanted independence and excitement. She dropped out of school and worked as a receptionist, dropped back in to sixth-form college and took a couple of A levels, then moved to London and a job in a department store.

  London never felt far enough from home. A woman she knew had lived in Japan and told Christa about the excitements and opportunities there. She had landed in Tokyo in January 1995, alone, at the age of nineteen. She would live there for most of the next seven years.

  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. “I really loved Japan,” Christa told me. “I still do, although it’s a love/hate thing too. There are some things I find appalling and some things that I love. But there was a lot of freedom, because no matter what you do there, you’re a freak, aren’t you? People are going to stare at you anyway, so you can stop worrying about it and let your hair down. And you’re making good money, so you can really let your hair down. You’re so far away, you feel that anything you do is going to be insulated from your real life.”

  Christa was tall, blond, and wild. She briefly took a job as an English teacher, but the work bored her; within a few weeks she was a hostess in a small club called Fraîche. It was in Akasaka, the district adjoining, and upmarket of, Roppongi, a resort of Japanese salarymen rather than young gaijin. A handful of authentic geisha still worked in Akasaka in traditional teahouses patronized by Japanese politicians and the executives of the country’s biggest companies. But such people rarely walked into Fraîche. Most of Christa’s customers were lonely, charmless men, for whom a couple of hours spent talking in English to a pretty young foreign girl was an exotic, and otherwise unobtainable, pleasure.

  “There was a small bar, a karaoke machine, six to eight girls,” she said. “It was a tame place. Sometimes there were customers who were aggressive or mean or had bad breath, but only a few of them were really unpleasant. Most of them were fine—the biggest drag was the boredom. The dōhans were stress-free—just dinner somewhere in Akasaka, and then back to the club.” The most successful hostesses adopted a persona of naïve innocence; customers often seemed reassured by the sensation of conversing with someone less intelligent than them. Christa could never bring herself to play dumb and developed other means of filling the time: silly drinking games (and she liked to drink), flirtatious conversational gambits, and drugs.

  The mid-1990s represented the last wheezing gasp of Japan’s bubble economy, but there was still a lot of loose money in Tokyo and startling rewards for hostesses with the right tactics: stories circulated about girls who had been given Rolexes, gold bars, even apartments by infatuated customers. Akasaka’s greater respectability compared to Roppongi was reflected in the money paid to its hostesses. Having earned $180 a week in London, Christa was now being paid ¥3,000 (close to $30) an hour, and that was before bonuses for requests and dōhan.


  One night a man whom she hadn’t seen before came into the club. From the depth of the manager’s bows and the obsequiousness of his welcome, she knew that he must be an established and high-spending customer. He introduced himself as Yuji Honda, and it was immediately obvious that he was a cut above the average patron of Club Fraîche.

  He was a short man in his early forties, with a manner and bearing quite different from the typical salaryman. His face was unremarkable, but he wore an expensive-looking jacket with an open-necked silk shirt. He spoke good English, and unlike many of the customers, he was never obviously lecherous, or clownish, or pitiable. “He had this strained kind of arrogance and confidence about him that I always found amusing,” Christa said. “Because he wasn’t particularly good-looking or winning in his personality. But I did find him intriguing, not like most of the other customers. He was difficult to figure out. There were oddities about him.

  “He had a bit of a swagger, sort of an arrogant way of walking. And there was something odd about the way he talked. It’s difficult to describe—it was almost like a lisp, something funny about the shape of his mouth. It was almost like a baby’s mouth. He used to slip his tongue in and out, like a lizard.” And he sweated—even in the air-conditioned chill of the club, he would frequently produce a small hand towel and mop his face and neck and brow.

  Christa and Yuji spent all of that first evening together; he promised her that he would come to see her again. It had all the makings of the perfect dōhan relationship.

  For a month, they went out for dinner every week. Each evening he pulled up in a different car: a white Rolls-Royce convertible, and three kinds of Porsche. Christa made a point of not being impressed by money, but she recognized that this, by any hostess’s definition, was the dream customer. Once, Yuji took her for a lavish Chinese banquet, complete with dishes of jellyfish and shark-fin soup; another time, they dined on fugu, the famous puffer fish, which can be poisonous unless it is correctly, and expensively, prepared. He didn’t talk much about himself, but the display of money was evidently important to Yuji; someone in the club told Christa that his family was the fifth richest in Japan. “He was really into fugu—he said that he ate it every day,” Christa remembered. “That was just one example of the way he showed off. I always find it funny when people think that because they’ve got money, they are a fabulous person.” This was how Christa regarded Yuji—unusual, mildly ludicrous, and harmless.

  One night in May 1995, he picked her up after work and suggested a drive to the seaside. It was three a.m., but Christa was never one to let conventional notions about bedtime get in the way of an adventure, and she was curious to see the holiday home Yuji had described. They drove there in the white Rolls-Royce. Christa was shivering in the powerful air-conditioning, but Yuji was sweating in his thin silk shirt. “It was really noticeable,” she said. “I thought that he must be on coke or speed or something, although he wasn’t. And he was a really bad driver. He always had his foot either hard down on the accelerator or on the brake, never anything in between.” Christa was only vaguely aware of the direction in which they were driving, but after an hour or so, they arrived at a marina where yachts were moored. Next to it were apartment buildings containing holiday flats; tall palm trees shook ragged leaves in the wind off the sea. As Yuji had talked about this place, Christa imagined a beach house along Californian or Australian lines, a villa with its own garden and a private swimming pool. The reality was a disappointment: a large building containing dozens of identical cramped apartments. “As soon as I saw the place, I thought, ‘What am I doing here?’” she said. “I thought, ‘This guy doesn’t really have as much money as he says.’”

  The apartment was on the third floor, a small, slightly shabby bachelor pad with a single living room facing onto a thin strip of balcony, a narrow kitchen, and a still smaller partitioned-off area that appeared to be a bedroom. There was nothing glamorous or seductive about the place. The sofa was luridly upholstered in thick fabric bearing a pattern of creeping foliage and cabbage roses. Behind it was a sideboard laden with bottles of different shapes and colors. “His apartment was really naff,” Christa said. “Kitsch, like maybe his mother decorated the place for him. All the furniture seemed kind of seventies—grandmotherly and floral, that kind of feeling.”

  They sat down to drink beer and eat the fugu, which Yuji had brought with him. Then he produced an electric guitar and plugged it into an amplifier. A recorded backing track started up and he began playing and singing along. The song was “Samba Pa Ti” by Carlos Santana, of whom Yuji was an enthusiastic devotee. He even had a photograph of himself with the singer in the United States. “I quite liked Santana, but playing along to him on a karaoke track—well, I thought that was pretty naff too,” Christa said. “By now, it had started to get light outside, and I was thinking that this had all gone on long enough.” She told Yuji that she wanted to go back to Tokyo, but he said he had one more thing to show her. He described it as a rare wine from the Philippines; it was among the clutter of bottles on the sideboard. He poured a measure of it into a small glass from a crystal decanter and handed it to Christa, who downed it in a single draught as she stood by the window.

  For other women in the same situation, that was the last thing they knew: the acrid, chemical taste of the “wine” going down. But months of hard drinking had made Christa tolerant of the most powerful intoxicants. “I had no expectation at all of anything being wrong,” she said. “And I think he’d cottoned on that I liked to drink a lot and that I was the sort of person who always took on a challenge. I drank it because that was the kind of thing I did then—I was into being tough. I can remember standing at the window as it came on, realizing what had happened and that this could be a very big problem. I had time to reflect on what was happening. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, fuck.’ It was like going under a general anesthetic. I was already too drugged to feel afraid.”

  * * *

  She woke up in the darkness lying alone in a bed. She understood immediately what had happened and the kind of thing that must have taken place while she was unconscious. “I remember thinking, ‘How do I feel?’ and trying to work out what exactly had happened to me. But I didn’t feel sore. And I had my clothes on. I thought that I must have been asleep a long time, because he’d bothered to dress me.”

  They had driven to the apartment in the early hours of Saturday morning. It was now Saturday evening—Christa had been unconscious for more than twelve hours. Yuji was there, behaving almost as though nothing had happened. It was as if he was waiting for her to say something, to hurl an accusation—but Christa was silent. “I just wanted to get home. I remember thinking, ‘If he doesn’t take me back, how will I get to Tokyo?’ because I had no idea where I was. But he did drive me back.” Christa felt hungover in the car, but she often did in those days. Otherwise she was calm.

  She said, “It seems pretty strange to me now, the way I behaved. But the thing with hostessing is that it’s like a game, for the girls and the guys. The girls are trying to get money, with no intention of giving anything back. And the guys are trying to get as far as they can, without giving any more than they would normally pay in the club. When I woke up that day I was angry, but I felt like it was partly my own doing to be in that situation. I think that’s pretty typical from what I’ve heard—that women who’ve been raped feel partly responsible.

  “I thought I’d understood the rules, but I hadn’t. I was naïve in that way. So I felt he’d won the game. I was pissed off, but I didn’t really reflect on it that much. I wasn’t really conscious of the dangerousness of the situation. It wasn’t until years later that I realized. Actually, I didn’t want to think about it, because if I’d admitted how dangerous it was I would have had to change the way I lived my life.”

  Yuji dropped Christa off at home later that evening. The following week she went back to work at the club. He didn’t come in again.

  * * *

  Christa stayed in
Japan, living the life of the hostess. She moved to different clubs in new Japanese cities. She would work for a few months, accumulating cash, and then spend weeks traveling for pleasure, to India, Iceland, Canada.

  In 1999 she was living in Sapporo, in the far north of Japan. There she met a foreign girl who had stories of a wealthy man who preyed on hostesses in Tokyo, taking them to a seaside apartment and drugging them. It could only be Yuji Honda. It was the first time that she had consciously thought about the incident in years.

  A few months later, Christa was living in Japan’s second city, Osaka, when she got a telephone call from an old friend, a former Tokyo hostess who had moved back to London. The girl’s younger sister was coming out to Japan with a friend—would Christa meet up with them in Tokyo?

  The caller was Emma Phillips. The pair bound for Tokyo were Louise Phillips and Lucie Blackman.

  Christa booked the room in Sasaki House. It was she who was waiting for them when they arrived, smoking spliffs and having her hair dressed in the oil that so revolted Louise. The three women spent that evening together. Lucie and Louise found Christa intimidatingly self-assured, but she was charmed, and even touched, by them.

  “They were so excited and vibrant—two young girls on their first big trip, their first break for independence. I remember thinking that Lucie was like me when I was nineteen, physically, I mean—tall and blond and so on. And Louise and Emma could be identical twins. So it was strange when they walked in the room, like looking five years back in time at me and Emma. And I remember thinking straightaway that Lucie was [Yuji’s] type—if I was his type, then she would be too—and feeling a bit worried for them because they were so green. But they were happy and enthusiastic, and I wanted them to have a good time. I didn’t want to put a downer on it, so I didn’t say anything about him. But I did think of him, which was odd because he wasn’t someone I normally thought about.”