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

  “He has no true friend. It’s hard to say why I know this—it’s just a feeling I have, from his eyes and the expression on his face. I try to look him in the eye, but he avoids direct eye contact. It’s a complex feeling—not just simple sorrow, but pathos. He is so lonely, so lonely. There is something tragic about him.”

  The one creature for whom Obara had a straightforward love was his Shetland sheepdog, Irene, who would play such a bizarre posthumous role in the case of Lucie Blackman. In his few public statements, Obara mentioned her repeatedly, so we know that her favorite brand of dog food was Cesar boil-in-the-bag meat, and her favorite snack was dried filefish. By the side door of the entrance to the Den-en Chofu house was a life-size statue of the dog, with bared teeth and a glistening ceramic tongue. He referred to her as “my beloved dog” and “beloved dog Irene.” After she died, on July 6, 1994, Obara preserved Irene’s body for six years. “With the advancement of cloning technology,” he wrote later, “in the hope of reviving the dog which I loved so much, I put her to rest in a large freezer. I also enclosed some roses and some of her favorite treats.”

  * * *

  Obara’s businesses flourished, for a while. The value of property, and the rents that a landlord could charge, were going up and up. At one point, it was later reported, the total value of his assets was ¥4 billion, about $38 million. But he also had debt, to which he kept on adding well after it was prudent to do so. Land prices in Japan had peaked in 1989, and by the early 1990s it had become obvious that the bubble was over forever. But in 1993, Obara established yet another company, for his most ambitious project so far—the construction of a skyscraper of offices and shops on the site of one of his Osaka parking lots. A prospectus was published with artists’ impressions of the finished building, a soaring, gleaming, twelve-story structure of shiny blue glass, with a lofty, marbled atrium and an exterior busy with spikes and cylinders and sculptures of gleaming orbs within curving metallic crescents. “An outstandingly ‘gorgeous’ futuristic ‘silhouette’ in the Kita-Shinchi district, crowded with ‘high society’ shops,” ran the promotional copy. “A wholly twenty-first-century ‘landscape.’” The key words were English ones, clumsily Japanized: gōjyasu, shiruetto, haisosaetii. The Kita-Shinchi Tower was a monstrosity, a dog’s dinner of bubble pretension and kitsch, dated even by 1993. And it would never be built. Three years later, Obara’s creditors were suing him for recovery of unpaid loans, and in 1999 the house in Den-en Chofu was temporarily sequestered by the court.

  The son of the Korean horsemeat trader said to me, “There were reasons why the second and third generations did not study hard. The best universities in Japan were supposed to offer the best jobs after graduation, but for people of my age at least, the opportunities were silently blocked off. So I can well imagine why he gave up studying in that social environment—that and the fact that he was so rich, he’d inherited such a huge fortune, that he didn’t need to work. He was the most promising of the four brothers. But what was waiting for him at his expensive high school? Just booze and girls. Because he was rich. It’s not surprising that he lost his motivation.

  “My guess is that in the United States he felt accepted for himself—not as a Korean or a Japanese, just as himself. But when he came back to Japan he failed in business. He didn’t have the talent. He wasted so much of his fortune. He managed to make money during the property bubble, but when the collapse came it was the familiar story of failure.”

  Manabu Miyazaki, the writer and son of a yakuza family, told me, “There’s a typical type. You have a father who’s a big success, a first-generation immigrant who got rich. But he’s a simple man, maybe he can’t even understand Japanese that well. So he wants to give his sons the best education possible. They’re given all the opportunities but still they fail. They take over the father’s business, but even with all their capital and education, it doesn’t work out. Because they’re not as aggressive as the father. They have the academic background but they’re not interested in real business, and they always have to ask for help from the father’s generation. And they still can’t overcome their handicaps. They have money, but their life is not fulfilled. Seeking support, being scolded by the father’s generation, their life is very twisted.”

  * * *

  A month after Obara’s arrest, his lawyer, Yoshinori Hamaguchi, issued a statement to the “reporters’ club” of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police in the name of his client. Later, Obara would claim that Hamaguchi had written it and that he himself had not even seen it before it was released. But its style and content were in keeping with much of what was to come.

  “I have in the past engaged in sexual activity with various gaijin hostesses and paid companions, all of whom were little more than glorified prostitutes,” it began.

  I am presently being held for paying money to prostitutes for SEX PLAY, which I like to call “conquest play.” Regarding the case for which I was arrested: I can’t remember clearly because it took place a few years ago, but I had sexual relations with some of those so-called victims. They were all employed as gaijin bar hostesses or paid companions. Most of them took cocaine or other drugs right in front of my eyes. They were all willing to take money in return for SEX PLAY and I subsequently paid the appropriate sums. Therefore I do not believe that I am guilty of rape or sexual assault …

  The police tell me that they are going to find every foreign hostess who has had SEX PLAY with me in the past, make them lodge complaints against me, and rearrest me repeatedly until they find the missing Miss Lucie Blackman. What is more, they are completely closing their eyes to illegal conduct, including illegal drugs, working illegally, prostitution, etc. committed by those gaijin hostess women. They intend to make me the scapegoat for everything.

  Regarding Miss Lucie Blackman: I was served by Miss Lucie Blackman at a gaijin club once only, and introduced to a certain man. After that I found fragments of an address in my mail box, strange letters, and strange things happened one after another. There are many things I don’t understand.

  In late October, veteran detectives in charge of this case (Inspector Y, Assistant Inspector I) told me in a serious manner that a dangerous man had been observed in Britain, and that a suspicious British person arrived in Tokyo (I took it to be a sniper). I feel as if I’ve been sucked into something big, and that I’ve been framed, but I have nothing to do with the missing Miss Lucie Blackman … The media has portrayed me as if I were the criminal responsible for Miss Lucie’s disappearance. This is not true …

  The Tokyo Metropolitan Police keep telling me that Miss Lucie’s disappearance is a very important case and that they have to solve it very soon. I think that they are hard pressed by Prime Minister Mori, and believe that unless they solve it quickly the national interest will be damaged … I now feel strongly that Japan is heading towards the revival of a police state … The authorities are putting the final touches to making me look all bad, all black. They set me up all right. The police say they will arrest someone for Lucie’s disappearance and that until they do, they will continue arresting me on the charge of sexual assault and SEX PLAY with gaijin bar hostesses. I hope they catch the real criminal soon.

  In different circumstances, this baffling document might have painted a sympathetic and persuasive picture of a scared and lonely eccentric, guilty of nothing more serious than consorting with prostitutes, now set up by the police in a desperate effort to dispose of the case that was giving them so much trouble. But this version of events could not withstand the emerging facts. For while Obara sat silent in his cell, Superintendent Udo and his men were on another floor engaged in what for Japanese detectives was an unfamiliar task: processing the thousands of objects removed from the properties and attempting to prove a case, by means of physical evidence, against a suspect who refused to confess.

  16. CONQUEST PLAY

  Joji Obara adored sushi; he had particular, and very expensive, tastes. Zushi Marina, where the palm trees grew and where he k
ept his apartment, was a community of second homes. Neighbors scarcely recognized neighbors, and there was no recollection of Obara among the people who shared the apartments next to number 4314. But one family remembered him distinctly: the proprietors of the local sushi shop.

  He never went there in person, but he placed many orders for delivery by telephone. Weeks would pass when they heard nothing from him; then he would call the shop every day for three days. He always ordered the tokujo, or special set—nine pieces of the freshest and juiciest tuna belly, cod roe, and sea urchin on squeezed lumps of vinegared rice—and awabi, the abalone, or “Venus’s-ear,” a marine mollusk whose rubbery flesh was the most expensive item on the menu. His favorite was kimo, the liver of the abalone, a dish strange and exotic even to Japanese. To aficionados, the awabi was prized as an aphrodisiac; its innards were held to be especially potent in this regard. It was also a characteristic bubble delicacy, an advertisement for connoisseurship and extravagance: at the restaurant in Zushi, a single serving cost ¥6,000.

  The young man who made the deliveries remembered Obara well, even before the police, and then the camera crews, had tracked him down, and he had repeated the story a dozen times. “There are some people you never notice, but there was something special about him,” he said. “There was a funny atmosphere in that place—a bit creepy. I remember that whenever I pushed the bell, he always coughed twice just before he opened the door—Khh-khh. He’d often be in a white bathrobe and he wore dark glasses, even though he was inside. The light was so dim, it was difficult to make out his face. But there was a smell—like incense. Incense and cigars. Maybe eau de cologne.

  “I never saw anyone else there. I never saw a woman’s shoes in the entryway. But the food he ordered was too much for one. He always asked for a receipt, too—usually it came to ¥9,000 or more. He spoke softly, he was quite polite. Just one time, I forgot to bring the kimo and afterward he rang the shop and complained about that. He particularly loved that kimo.”

  * * *

  Joji Obara kept meticulous records of his sexual encounters, beginning in April 1970, when he was seventeen years old. In court, he would dismiss these as fantasy, but if they were even partly true, then he was a prodigious womanizer. He would be criminally convicted of nine rapes, but they represented only a fragment of the activity recorded in the form of documents, photographs, and videotapes that were retrieved by the police from the house in Den-en Chofu and from the apartments in central Tokyo and Zushi Marina. The acts they recorded were not sudden explosions of violence and anger. From the descriptions of those who sifted through the evidence, they did not even seem to be principally about the discharge of lust. In documents discovered by the police, and in his own court testimony, Obara described in detail his sexual methods and tastes. He called it “conquest play.”

  He referred to the flat at Zushi Marina as his kyoten, a word meaning “foothold” or “hub,” and suggesting something close to a strategic base. He kept video equipment, including professional lights, there, and he had attached hooks to the ceiling above the bed, the better to array his victims. Not every woman who visited it was raped; Obara, who was a small man, never pitted himself physically against his victims. The outcome of the play depended entirely on whether he could trick them into unconsciousness. If he failed in this, they walked away, aware of no more than fleeting social unease. But apart from the ladies’ lavatory where he was caught peeping, there was no evidence that he perpetrated his crimes anywhere else.

  It was weeks before Obara admitted it, but the detectives quickly dispelled any doubts that Lucie had been to Zushi Marina. Hundreds of strands of hair were removed from the apartment. Comparisons with the DNA from fingernail clippings provided by Jane and Tim Blackman confirmed that several of them belonged to their daughter. An undeveloped roll of film, one of many they recovered, was processed and found to contain two shots of her, the last images ever recorded of Lucie. She stood in front of a railing with the sea behind her and a town and hills visible across the bay. She wore her short black dress, the heart-shaped pendant glinted on her neck, and her sunglasses were pushed up over her hair. In her right hand she held a can of beer; if there was tension in her smile, it was barely perceptible. Only the position of her left arm, held away from her body at an awkward angle, suggested the artificiality and discomfort of her situation: simulating pleasure and ease for the sake of a stranger with a mobile phone to give away.

  Experts analyzed the photographs in detail, and the police identified the precise spot by the marina where Lucie had been standing. The weather, the angle of the light, the appearance of the distant town, even the position of a buoy bobbing behind her right shoulder—all were consistent with it having been taken late on the afternoon of July 1, 2000.

  The prepaid telephones, whose calls had been tracked so assiduously, were recovered too. And there was a handbag, a kind of male purse commonly carried by Japanese businessmen, containing two items of interest. The first was a gas bill, on which was scribbled the number of one of the prepaid mobiles from which Lucie had called Louise and Scott. The second was a sachet of powder. It was analyzed and identified as a powerful hypnotic drug called flunitrazepam. The name meant little in Japan, where it was occasionally administered as a treatment for the most severe insomnia. But under the brand name Rohypnol, it is the most notorious of the so-called date-rape drugs. The police found samples of another unusual pharmaceutical, commonly used for the same purpose—gamma-hydroxybutyric acid or GHB—and thirteen bottles of chloroform, two of them unopened.

  The volume of documents taken away from the apartments—from thick notebooks and diaries to yellowing, decade-old receipts—was vast. The police and prosecutors would continue sifting through them, uncovering new and incriminating material. But early on, according to one Japanese newspaper, they came upon a list of about sixty women’s names, Japanese and foreign. Beside each one were the aliases, almost all of them different, that Obara had used over the years: Yuji, Koji, Kazu, Kowa, Honda, Saito, Iwata, Iwasaki, Akira. The list went back years; some of the women were identified by just a single name, but for others there were telephone numbers or addresses.

  The detectives also found receipts for several ambitious shopping expeditions that Obara had made in the early days of July. On Sunday the second, the day after Lucie’s disappearance, he had bought twenty pounds of dry ice from a dealer near Blue Sea Aburatsubo, as well as a large packing box; the following day he had returned to the same place and bought twenty pounds more. “Is it for a big dog that’s passed away?” the dealer asked, and Obara agreed that it was.

  On Tuesday the fourth, he had gone to the Tokyo branch of L. L. Bean and purchased camping equipment, including three two-man tents, three groundsheets, a folding table, a seven-gallon cooler, flashlights, and a sleeping bag. The same day, at a hardware store, he bought a towel, three bags of cement, five cans of quick-setting agent for the cement, a stirrer, a plastic box, a paintbrush, a bucket, and a broom. At a third shop, he bought chisels, a hammer, wire, a knife, scissors, gloves, plastic bags, an axe, a handsaw, and a chain saw. The staff at several of the shops remembered that Obara had telephoned the day before, describing exactly what he needed and confirming that his requisites were in stock.

  Then there were notebooks and diaries filled with Obara’s handwriting and dating back to his high school days and audiocassettes recording telephone conversations and spoken memos to himself, manifestos of intention and resolve. One especially rich source of material was a binder containing loose leaves of paper, which was described at length in a document prepared by the prosecutors:

  The defendant lists the names of the women with whom he has had sexual relations since 1970 and the conduct of their sexual intercourse. In this notebook, starting with the entry “I administered sleeping drugs” in April 1970, he records sexual acts with numerous women after administering sleeping drugs and chloroform …

  At the beginning of the book, there is a record of the nu
mber of people with whom he has had sexual relations in each year, such as “1990 nine people, 1991 nine people,” and there is a record of the number of people with whom he has had sexual relations by nationality … and there is also a record of the conduct of his sexual relations with 209 women between around 1970 when the defendant was 17 years old and 1995 when the defendant was 33 years old.

  … There is a note (1970, 4th woman) to the effect that “I got a woman drunk and gave her a sleeping drug, but could not have intercourse because she was a virgin,” regarding an experience in 1969. There is also a mention to the effect of using “Hyminal” [a sedative, also known as Quaalude] (1970, 3rd woman), “Chloroform, sleeping drug” (1973, woman no. 26), “SMYK (sleeping drug)” (1981, woman no. 63), “speciality SMY (sleeping drug)” (1983, woman no. 95), “CRO … HOL (chloroform),” “SMY” (1983, women no. 97, 98), and “sMY ice cream.” It can be acknowledged that from his early days, he was repeatedly committing quasi-rape using sleeping drugs and chloroform.

  Moreover, the defendant writes that having sex with women using sleeping drugs and chloroform is the defendant’s modus operandi. For example

  “I do it in the flat following the usual pattern. SY (sleeping drug) was good, but CRORO (chloroform) was unnecessary, and (she) ended up vomiting badly.” (woman no. 150)

  “Made her sleep in the flat with SMY ice cream + chocolate, and then PV (porn video).”

  He writes that from around 1983, he has been taking photos of, and filming with a video camera, the rape scenes, such as “full-scale VTR (video) No. 1” (woman no. 139), “PV (porn video),” “PP (porn photo)” (woman no. 152), “foreigner video No. 1” (woman no. 160), “went to Zushi, like always, FC (fuck), PV” (woman no. 162).

  The police pounced immediately upon the videos, of course. They littered the apartments, some unmarked, others with a woman’s name and a date scribbled on a label. They dated back to the 1980s; some of them were in the long-obsolete Betamax format. Once they had dug out and dusted off a machine capable of replaying them, the detectives worked in relays, loading and watching the flickering films, rewinding, carefully logging content and duration. It quickly became clear that the videos followed a pattern.