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

  Two months later, she was back in Osaka when Emma called with the news that Lucie had gone missing. “She said that she’d gone out with a customer from work on a drive to the sea, and she hadn’t come home. I was immediately sure, absolutely sure, that it was Yuji.”

  She phoned Louise, who was incoherent with distress. Christa said, “I thought that he’d let her go after she’d come round from the drug, like I did. I thought she’d come back.” But after two days, there was still no sign of Lucie. Christa took the bullet train to Tokyo and went directly to Azabu Police Station.

  * * *

  Japan has the cuddliest police in the world. To many Japanese, the mere sight of omawari-san (literally, “Honourable Mr. Go Around,” the expression for the cop on the beat) provokes feelings of tender pride more conventionally aroused by children or small, appealing animals. To the foreigner, too, there is something touchingly nostalgic about their neat navy blue uniforms and clunky, old-fashioned bikes. It is hard to believe that the handguns they carry at their hips contain real bullets and impossible to imagine them ever being fired (prudently, they are attached to their uniforms by a cord, like a child’s mittens). And then there is the symbol of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, the country’s proudest and most prestigious force: not a stern mastiff, or a watchful hawk, but a cheerful orange fairy named Peepo. The police are one of the things that impart to Tokyo its quaint, innocent, 1950s flavor: a tribe of earnest Boy Scouts, protecting the city from evildoers.

  On the face of it, they are astonishingly and uniquely successful. Japan, like most nations, goes through spasms of anxiety about youthful delinquency and the erosion of traditional morals. But the essential fact remains: by every measure, Japan is the safest and least crime-ridden country on earth. Offenses like muggings, burglary, and drug dealing, which city dwellers in the rest of the world have learned to accept as part of everyday life, are between four and eight times lower than in the West.

  Violent crime is rarer still, and for all of this the Japanese police proudly take credit. They believe that because Japan has the world’s lowest crime rate, they must therefore be the world’s greatest crime fighters. For years, this was the view of the Japanese population. One encounters little of the low-level cynicism that the inhabitants of other world cities instinctively feel towards the forces of law and order. But in 2000, at the time that Christa Mackenzie went to Azabu Police Station, this loyal consensus was unraveling.

  After a series of scandals, the Japanese police were facing their most vociferous criticism in decades. Across the country, police officers had been exposed for sexual harassment, bribery, blackmail, drug taking, assault, and simple professional incompetence.* The Yomiuri Shimbun, one of the most conservative and pro-establishment of the country’s newspapers, called the situation “a disgrace, the likes of which have not been witnessed in a long time.” An editorial in the same newspaper said that “to straighten out this organisation, which has completely lost discipline, the only solution is complete, drastic reform.” An opinion poll showed that 60 percent of Japanese did not trust the police, compared to 26 percent in the previous survey two years earlier. It was in this atmosphere of defensiveness and anxiety that the investigation into Lucie’s disappearance began.

  * * *

  By their own account, the police had moved with unusual speed. “I want you to understand how quickly we liaised among ourselves,” said Chief Superintendent Fusanori Matsumoto, the head of Azabu Police Station and the man who supervised the first days of the Lucie Blackman investigation. “We were motivated by our instincts as veterans. And then there was the fact that this girl was British, and the fact that she had been a cabin attendant for a famous company such as British Airways, a job that many girls aspire to.”*

  The converse of this, although the superintendent would never have spelled it out, was that if the missing woman had been, for example, a Chinese or a Bangladeshi whose previous career had been in a fish-canning factory or a massage parlor, his interest in the case would have been drastically reduced. “At first they didn’t take it all that seriously,” one person close to the investigation told me. “It was just another girl who had gone missing in Roppongi. In Tokyo, girls go missing quite often—Filipinas, Thais, Chinese. It’s impossible to investigate them all.” What marked this case out from others was not merely the nationality of the victim, or the identity of her former employer, but the intense external pressure that quickly came to bear on the police.

  First it was just Sophie Blackman visiting the police station, demanding answers. But soon she was accompanied by Alan Sutton, the formidable British consul general, whose staff were on the phone every day. Then Tim Blackman arrived, and soon—and unbelievably—he was talking to Tony Blair. The detectives, and many of the Japanese reporters, were astounded by this last development. The equivalent situation—a Japanese prime minister intervening in the search for a mislaid mizu shōbai girl—was unthinkable. (“That Mr. Blackman,” Chief Superintendent Matsumoto asked me at one point in our interview, as if it were the only possible explanation, “was he a friend of Prime Minister Blair?”)

  And then Tony Blair was taking the problem to the Japanese prime minister, who had no choice but to express his own concern and determination—and all of this under the noses of dozens of reporters. “We had an understanding with the Japanese media, we knew how to handle them,” said Chief Superintendent Matsumoto. “But we had no idea how to deal with the foreign media. It was very annoying.”

  Matsumoto telephoned Jane Blackman in Sevenoaks and heard from her what everyone who knew Lucie would repeat: it was inconceivable that she would have gone off on her own without explanation. On July 11, a special investigation headquarters was established in Azabu Police Station to look into the case, headed by one of the most experienced detectives in Tokyo, Toshiaki Udo. Superintendent Udo was second in command of Tokyo’s First Criminal Investigation Division, and his men were the elite of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. They handled the greatest and most sensational crimes in the country: murders, rapes, kidnappings, armed robberies. For fame and glamour, they were the equivalent of Scotland Yard’s Flying Squad, the fictionalized heroes of film, television, and novels. Superintendent Udo had worked on Japan’s biggest postwar criminal investigation—into the apocalyptic religious cult Aum Shinrikyo, which released sarin nerve gas on the Tokyo subway during the morning rush hour in 1995. He was a rather tall, oval-faced man, with wide and intense eyes that gave him an expression of constant mild surprise. He had about him the air of a kindly deputy headmaster rather than a tough detective, and it was difficult to imagine him expressing extremes of any kind of emotion. But the search for Lucie literally shook him. “I worked on many big cases, on many famous cases,” he told me. “But when the responsibility of solving the Lucie case was given to me, my body trembled physically with the tension. I sensed, by instinct, that it would turn out to be a serious crime. I could smell it. I knew that we couldn’t ignore it.”

  His immediate subordinate was Akira Mitsuzane, who would deal face-to-face with the Blackman family. It had taken over a week for the police system to wake up, clear its throat, and decide that there was work for it to do—and by its own standards, that was good going.

  * * *

  What did the detectives do for the next few weeks? It is difficult to reconstruct the sequence of events fully, but nothing happened fast. By the time Udo’s special investigation headquarters had been established, Matsumoto’s officers had already confirmed the basic facts of Louise’s story: the status of the two girls in Japan, their residence at Sasaki House and employment at Casablanca. This took three days. But from the moment that Louise reported Lucie’s disappearance on July 3, it was more than six weeks before they made any concrete progress at all.

  Early checks were run on religious cults in Chiba prefecture. (“There are so many, though,” said one detective. “We need more information.”) But other exceedingly obvious leads remained unpursued. Almost two w
eeks after Lucie’s disappearance, the police had still not spoken to Lucie’s boyfriend, Scott Fraser, nor had they made any efforts to interview anyone called Akira Takagi, the name by which the mysterious caller had identified himself. “It could be a fictitious name,” a spokesman said. “We do not want people of the same name to be unnecessarily troubled.”

  The police did go to Casablanca, interviewed its hostesses, and combed through the club’s records. Some, but not all, customers left business cards; those who were entertaining on business were given receipts with the names of their companies, of which the club kept a copy. But having harvested this information, it took an inexplicably long time to process. It was well into August, for example, before anyone called on Hajime Imura, the publisher who had entertained Lucie with his squid-fishing exploits.

  Instead, the police questioned Louise Phillips over and over again. Her first full day at Azabu Police Station was July 4, the Tuesday after Lucie’s disappearance. For the next five weeks, from Monday to Saturday, she was there every day.

  The interrogations took place in a ten-foot-square room containing a table at which Louise sat with two detectives and a police interpreter. They began first thing in the morning and often went on until night. From the beginning, she was struck both by the warmth and tenderheartedness of the individual officers, and their capacity for punishingly long working hours.

  Every day, the police would bring lunch to Louise—several times, the wife of one officer or other presented her with a bento, a lunch box of small delicacies that she had personally prepared. The police provided an apartment for Louise to stay in and paid her a per diem allowance of ¥5,000. (Unabashed by this generosity, she would save the money up and buy herself a camera.) Louise’s confusion and anxiety frequently reduced her to helpless tears; more than once, she noticed that her female interpreter, and even the interrogating male officers, also had tears in their eyes.

  But the content of the interviews did not inspire confidence. It was obvious that Louise was a key witness: Lucie’s oldest friend and closest companion, and the last person known to have seen her. The length of her interrogation might have been justified if there had been new ground to cover. But for much of the time the detectives just asked the same few questions, over and over again. Their meticulousness was impressive, sometimes awe-inspiring. But their undifferentiated interest in absolutely everything suggested to Louise that they had little instinct for what might have happened, had not begun to narrow down their investigation, and apparently didn’t know where to begin.

  “They wanted to know everywhere we’d been, all that we’d done, everything about Lucie in such detail, from before we even came to Japan,” Louise said. “They were amazing. They were all working so hard. They wanted to know about Lucie’s birthmark, the birthmark she had at the top of her leg. And Lucie’s health, when she was younger. They were asking about my boyfriend, and my other friends, and all the people we lived with, and all the customers in the club. They wanted to know if any of the customers had had tattoos. But it was just the same questions, over and over again, for days and days.”

  Rather hesitantly, they asked if she and Lucie were lesbians (she spluttered with laughter at the suggestion). They wanted to know in detail about Lucie’s sex life: her relationship with Scott, the frequency of their nights together, the kind of contraception they had used. “They were asking me for about a week if Lucie had ever had chlamydia,” said Louise. “Why, I never understood. Some of the questions were so random, and they went on and on for hours and hours and hours.”

  “I had a good impression of Louise,” Superintendent Matsumoto told me. “Even so, we had to consider a range of possible scenarios. Could she have been part of a plot against her friend, for example? Suppose Lucie and Louise had fallen in love with the same man, and Louise wanted him for herself, and she had disposed of her friend? Or killed Lucie to steal money?” Some of the scenarios entertained by the investigators were bizarre. “We had information from people in the clubs that Lucie might be in North Korea, or that she might be a spy,” Matsumoto said. “We didn’t give it much consideration, because she had had so little money.”

  The question of whether drugs might have come into it was quickly settled. “Louise wasn’t using drugs, judging from the color of her face,” Matsumoto said. “And from her physical state when she was talking with us for long hours. There were no bubbles around her mouth, as you sometimes see in drug users. She wasn’t thin, and she didn’t get tired easily. There were none of those signs.” In other words, because a person was not pallid and emaciated and foaming at the mouth, she could not be a user of illegal drugs. This was an elderly maiden aunt’s view of narcotics and their effect. Coming from a proud detective, it was comically naïve, another sign of the innocence and unworldliness of the Japanese police, who faced so little serious crime that they sometimes had only the crudest idea of what it looked like.

  The detectives who took over the investigation after Matsumoto were not so innocent. One day Louise arrived in the interrogation room to see Lucie’s diary lying on the table accompanied by a Japanese translation.

  “Good morning, Louise-san,” the detective began and picked up the documents on the desk. “Louise, have you or Lucie ever taken drugs in Japan?”

  “No, no, never,” said Louise, shaking her head.

  “Are you sure?” said the detective, leafing through the diary.

  “Oh yes, I’m sure. Never.”

  For most of the time, the police did not give the impression of disbelieving Louise; their motive in questioning her at such length appeared to be genuine assiduousness rather than suspicion. But now the atmosphere had chilled.

  The detective asked Louise, “Why did Lucie write in her diary, ‘We have been on a never ending quest for music, postcards and drugs’?”

  Louise’s mind spun over and over. “I thought, ‘If they think she’s a drug taker, it’ll look really bad.’ So I said, ‘Oh, she was looking for some paracetamol or Nurofen, something like that.’”

  “You have not taken illegal drugs in Japan?” said the detective.

  “No, no.”

  “You are quite sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Louise, you have the words ‘I am a liar’ written on your forehead.”

  “He was right,” Louise told me. “I told them the whole story after that.”

  By the standards of many twenty-one-year-old British women, there wasn’t so much to tell. “I mean, there were lots of drugs around, but we just weren’t really that into them,” said Louise. “Once, some of the people in our house were taking magic mushrooms, and neither of us liked the idea. Lucie said, ‘I’d hate to be hallucinating, to be out of control like that.’” The two girls had never had supplies of their own marijuana, but they had taken drags of the spliffs that were passed around the living room of Sasaki House. And Louise said that they had taken tablets of Ecstasy when they were out clubbing in Roppongi—Louise twice (once on the occasion of the fight in Deep Blue) and Lucie once. They had been planning to buy more on the evening of July 1, the night out that had never happened.

  In normal circumstances, such an admission would have landed a foreigner in Japan in terrible trouble: possession of a drug like Ecstasy, even in the smallest quantities and for personal use, was a grave crime. “But I knew I had to tell the truth, and I told them the whole story,” Louise said. “I told them when, where, how much. And they were fine about it. It was more important to find Lucie. They worked so hard, they were working round the clock. I was there until late and they’d be there until a couple of hours after me. A couple of them had to take time off for exhaustion.”

  13. THE PALM TREES BY THE SEA

  Roppongi—at least the Roppongi of foreign hostesses and their customers—was a village; in the space of two days, everyone in its parish knew of Lucie’s disappearance. A week later, it was a headline across Britain and Japan. Two days after that, her face was on thirty thousand missing-perso
n posters. All over Tokyo—and in London, Melbourne, Tel Aviv, and Kiev—Roppongi hostesses, active and retired, were going through the same experience as Christabel Mackenzie, of sudden, jolting reacquaintance with a memory repressed: Clara from Canada, Isobel and Charmaine from Australia, Ronia from Israel, Katie from America, Lana from Britain, and Tanya from Ukraine. Each recalled a different name: Yuji, Koji, Saito, Akira. But the experience was the same: a well-dressed, middle-aged English-speaker with an expensive car; a drive to a seaside apartment among palm trees; a single sip of a drink, then darkness, followed many hours later by dizzy, nauseated consciousness.

  Some of the girls knew one another. A few had cautiously shared their stories. All of them, when they heard the story of Lucie, had the same reaction: it had to be him.

  Almost all had chosen not to go to the police, for the same reasons—because they were anxious about their visa status, because they didn’t know exactly what happened to them while unconscious, or because they knew very well and couldn’t bring themselves to look the experience in the face. One exception was the young American woman, Katie Vickers. Her experience vindicated the decision of the others. Katie Vickers’s story is an unanswerable reproach to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police.

  In 1997, she had been working at Club Cadeau. For Katie, the smartly dressed middle-aged man came by the name of Koji. The drink he gave her was gin and tonic. Her first sip of it was the last thing she remembered.

  Fifteen hours had passed by the time she awoke, lying on a sofa in her underwear. Koji explained that there had been a gas leak, and that he had a terrible headache too. He drove her halfway back to Tokyo, then put her in a cab, her handbag stuffed with cash and taxi vouchers.