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 had an immaculate recall of dates and details, and was intolerant of any lawyer who became muddled or confused. He was full of ideas, but they were often inconsistent or incoherent. “He’s clever enough to devise many strategies, but he can’t work out which is the best,” one of the lawyers said. “So he tries to combine them all together, in a way, and I feel that it will be in vain.”

  The problem was simple: How to answer the library of evidence meticulously assembled against him? On the rape charges, the argument was obvious: the sexual acts that took place and were recorded on video may have been unusual, but they were consensual. As Yasuo Shionoya, probably Obara’s most successful lawyer, told me, “Ladies who work as hostesses or the like—I believe that if they go to a man’s apartment, they are giving their consent to sex. That’s what Obara thought. He accepts that he caused injury by using drugs, he’ll accept the charge of causing injury. But he cannot understand [the charge of] rape. That’s his point. Logically, I think he may be right.”

  On the charge of raping, drugging, and killing Carita Ridgway, the defense was more complicated and depended on doubts about the cause of her death. Once again, Obara insisted that the sexual relationship had been consensual and that the video of him and the unconscious Carita had been made during an earlier encounter several weeks before her sudden illness. At the time, none of the doctors had concluded that the collapse of her liver had been caused by drugs. She might have been killed by inappropriate treatment after this misdiagnosis, or by a painkilling injection given to Carita by another doctor before Obara had taken her to the hospital.

  But what about Lucie? To some of his legal team, this was the most straightforward case of all, because there was no direct proof. “The important thing was that Obara and Lucie were alone—no one else knew what happened,” one of them said. “We don’t need to prove that Obara didn’t commit a crime. We just have to show that the prosecutors can’t prove it and point out how weak the evidence is. No video. Cause of death unknown. How could he carry such a large dead body out of the Zushi apartment, on his own, in midsummer, without anyone seeing him? How could he carry it into his car and cut it up in his apartment and bury it all on his own? All we had to do was emphasise all these weak points.”

  The conventional strategy, in other words, was not to defend the accused but to undermine the story told by the prosecution. But this was not enough for Obara. He wanted to tell a story of his own; he needed to fill the man-shaped hole.

  20. THE WHATEVERER

  The early years of the twenty-first century were intense and eventful ones for a foreign correspondent. For weeks at a time, I found myself traveling far from home in Tokyo, to Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Japan, for a while, became the peaceful, uneventful country where I restored myself between wars. But I was never able to forget entirely about Lucie Blackman and Joji Obara. The trial plodded along, at the rate of about one hearing a month, and whenever I could, I went to the Tokyo District Court myself, or sent a Japanese assistant who came back with pages of detailed and baffling notes. It was difficult to explain my continuing interest—two years after getting under way, the trial had lost its value as a news story. But somewhere deep within, it still itched and smarted and niggled; the mosquito whine continued to sound faintly in my ear.

  Even allowing for their slow pace, Japanese criminal trials typically last for a year or so at the most. By 2005, when the prosecutors were still summoning pathologists and forensic experts, this one had already become exceptionally prolonged. Partly this was because of the number of separate charges and witnesses, and the disposition of Obara’s defense team, whose frequent objections slowed the proceedings. But it also suggested a lack of confidence on the part of the prosecutors and a self-consciousness about the circumstantial character of some of their evidence. Finally, though, five years after Lucie’s death, and fifty-six months after his first appearance in court, the last prosecution witness was called and Joji Obara began to set out his defense.

  At this hearing, the public gallery was full. Sitting in the front row were Tim and Sophie Blackman, who had flown out for the hearing; a police interpreter scribbled notes for them as the proceedings unfolded. Obara sat between his guards, sharply angled, as usual, towards the judge and away from the gallery. He wore a light-gray suit; he looked very pale, like a man who has been long deprived of sunlight. As he stepped up to the witness stand, he carefully avoided directing his glance anywhere near Tim and Sophie.

  In the weeks leading up to this hearing, an atmosphere of anticipatory tension had transmitted itself from within Obara’s defense team. The fact that they were able to tolerate such a difficult client made his lawyers an unconventional and interesting group, and they were surprisingly chatty and frank about their client and his prospects. “His mood has swung throughout the hearings,” one of them told me. “I think he’s rather desperate in a way. Mixed feelings—irritable because he knows he can’t be confident of winning. There’s a risk he’ll be found guilty and he’s desperate to be acquitted. He swings back and forth between confidence and fear.”

  It was at this time that I established my own first, tentative contacts with Obara. One of his lawyers, who refused to talk to me himself, agreed to pass on my letter requesting an interview in the detention house, along with a list of questions. A reply, signed in the name of another lawyer but evidently dictated by Obara himself, was faxed back to me. “There are many fundamentals as well as important facts concerning the case of which the investigation side has not been able to know,” it read. “We believe that facts concerning Question No. 5, for example, which was the most important question formerly asked by you, Mr. Parry, will also be brought to light … It is also possible for us to provide you with a scoop hereafter, because, as Mr. Obara says, your company comes from the same country as the native country of Lucie.”

  My fifth question was: “You have said you have no responsibility for the death of Ms. Blackman. Who do you believe is responsible for her death?”

  The police and prosecutors had spent more than a year investigating and presenting their case on Lucie’s death. But Obara had had five years. During that time he had employed lawyers and private detectives numbering in the dozens and sent them out from the confinement of his cell. The version of events presented by the prosecutors was overwhelming in its detail and in the logic of its central question: If Obara hadn’t killed and sawed up Lucie, who had? Now Obara was to confront it with his own version of reality. It would have to be a masterpiece.

  He stood at the podium and began to read aloud his opening statement, a sheaf of closely handwritten pages. “To tell the truth about Lucie’s character will shame her family and make them depressed,” he lisped softly. “Parents always want to see their daughter as a pure creature, and every sister wants to respect her sister. I don’t want to ruin their image of her; I haven’t changed in my wish to avoid revealing her character. But it was because of it that I became embroiled in this terrible incident.”

  Obara’s defense had two elements. The first was to question and undermine every line of the prosecution case, to poke at its weak spots and expose its gaps, and to stifle its details with baffling details of his own. The second was to paint an alternative portrait of Lucie herself. This was the “scoop” that Obara had vouchsafed to me in a second fax sent shortly before the hearing: that far from being the blithe young woman described by her family and friends, she was tormented and self-destructive, and had died after consuming an overdose of illegal drugs.

  Under cross-examination by his own lawyers, Obara began to quote from Lucie’s diary, translating it into Japanese as he went. The passages he selected were those describing her most miserable moments—her mood swings, her loneliness and homesickness, her failures as a hostess and her envy of Louise’s success. “We have drunk more alcohol in the last 20 days than I have ever consumed in my whole drinking lifetime,” Obara read. “I am so fucking up to my neck in debt … I feel such a sense of dis
orientation and being lost … I can not stop crying … I feel so ugly & fat & invisible.”

  I hate the way I look, I hate my hair, I hate my face, I hate my nose, I hate my slanty eyes, I hate the mole on my face, I hate my teeth, I hate my chin, I hate my profile, I hate my neck, I hate my boobs, I hate my fat hips, I hate my fat stomach, I hate my flabby bum, I HATE my birthmark, I hate my bashed up legs, I feel so disgusting & ugly & average.

  On May 4, Lucie had written, “We have been on a never ending quest for … music (anything but Craig David), postcards & drugs!” Rather ingeniously, the police interpreter had taken the most incriminating word in this sentence to be “dugs” and declared that it made no sense. “But I consulted five professional translators,” Obara told the court, “and they all agreed it should be read as ‘drugs.’”

  “What’s the significance of buying postcards and drugs?” asked the defense lawyer, who once again gave the impression of reading from a prepared script of questions.

  “When young people travel overseas, it’s common for them to buy postcards,” Obara explained with worldly confidence. “And among drug users, it’s a common pattern that they buy postcards and drugs.”

  There was another unlikely discussion about a passage from the diary, which Obara read as follows: “As usual no matter where I am—I feel alone. It’s not toaks, it’s me.” Obara explained that a “toak,” more commonly spelled “toke,” was youthful slang for a marijuana cigarette. This admission of illegal drug use was an embarrassment to the prosecutors, who offered no response or rebuttal. But if they had consulted a native speaker, they would have learned that what Lucie had actually written was not “toaks” but “7oaks,” an abbreviated reference to her hometown.

  The chief judge was a man named Tsutomu Tochigi, who had very white and very even teeth that flashed in a smile even at moments of irritation and tension. Often, in fact, Justice Tochigi’s grin seemed to be a sign of his displeasure, rather than the opposite. It grew wider and wider, as Obara plowed on through the most lachrymose and self-pitying sections of Lucie’s diary.

  “It’s torture listening to these translations,” the judge said finally. “What does this have to do with the trial?” But now, Obara’s narrative shifted to the events of June and July 2000 and became stranger than ever.

  * * *

  The summer of that year had evidently been a complicated time for Obara. He was deep in negotiation with his creditors about the rescheduling of his debts. In June he had been hospitalized after a van drove into the back of his car, painfully wrenching his neck and damaging his eardrum. He was trying to sell off several of his properties, including the apartment in Blue Sea Aburatsubo. Weighing most heavily on his mind was beloved Irene, the Shetland sheepdog whose body he had preserved in the freezer of the house at Den-en Chofu. Having abandoned hope of resurrection through cloning, Obara decided to bury her in a plot of forest land that he owned on the Izu Peninsula. This was not a straightforward task, for there were large trees that would have to be cleared. But Obara, as he explained to the court, knew just the man for the job. He identified him as A-san—“Mr. A.” He was described as a nandemo-ya, literally a “purveyor of anything” or a “whateverer”: a jack-of-all-trades, or a fixer.

  Mr. A’s unexplained code name turned out to be one of the less unlikely things about him. Obara’s defense was so thick with bizarre detail that it became impossible to keep a mental account of it all. No sooner had one outré claim lurched into view than three or four more chased it in close succession. In 1997, he told the court, his car had exploded in an underground garage. (There was no further explanation of this alarming happening; evidently, this was just the kind of misfortune that befell Obara.) To investigate it, he had hired Mr. A, whom he had originally met by chance near Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station, when the nandemo-ya had offered him drugs. For ¥500,000, Mr. A agreed to clear the burial plot for beloved Irene. The task was scheduled for July 5 and 6, the second day being the sixth anniversary of the pet’s demise. And this explained one of the most persuasive pieces of circumstantial evidence against Obara: the tent, saws, and shovel he bought after Lucie’s disappearance. These, he was now able to explain, were not for dismembering and disposing of a dead woman but for camping out overnight, felling trees, and burying a dog.

  The plan was canceled because of unforeseen events the weekend before.

  Obara had met Lucie in Casablanca in the second half of June and agreed, at her request, to take her to the seaside. In its factual outlines, his account of that day matched the story told by the prosecutors—the drive to Zushi Marina, the photograph by the sea, the visit by the gas repairman, and the telephone calls to Louise and Scott. But Obara was in a position to describe what no one else could: Lucie’s conduct in the hours before her death.

  “Lucie was very excited,” Obara said. “This was not because of alcohol, but because of the influence of the ‘things’ which she had brought with her.” The “things” were pills of crystal meth, Ecstasy, and “toaks.” “Lucie had a high tolerance for alcohol and she continued to talk while drinking wine, champagne, then spirits such as gin and tequila,” Obara told the court. “Lucie told me she was a manic-depressive. In fact, she was in a manic state at the beginning, but as the time went on, she seemed to go into a depressive state … Of course, this was the influence of drugs too.”

  Lucie and Obara talked “about many things.” She complained to him about her debts and said that she was considering taking work at a “special club” in Roppongi to repay them more quickly (the implication was that this was a place of prostitution). He talked about his car accident and the pain he had in his neck. Lucie offered to give him a massage. “Although her massage was good, the pain didn’t go,” the book commissioned by his lawyer recorded, “so Lucie recommended the drugs she had. She told him any pain and discomfort would disappear, so Obara took them. That night, Obara took three different kinds of pills … Lucie showed her pierced navel to Obara, and told him she would pierce her left nipple … Obara was walking in the clouds from the pills Lucie gave him, and their powerful effect continued for more than an hour.”

  Tim and Sophie Blackman sat in silence in the front row of the gallery, as the police interpreter scrawled summaries of Obara’s words on the pages of a notebook. It was upsetting, of course, and a little humiliating, to hear Lucie’s sad little diary exposed like this—and disturbing in what it revealed of Obara’s ruthlessness and cunning. “As a parent it would be foolish for me to say definitively that Lucie had never taken drugs,” Tim said afterwards. “She may have had small amounts recreationally, as many people do. But I don’t believe that she was endangering her own life, and she certainly didn’t take Rohypnol herself.” To anyone who knew Lucie, the picture Obara painted of a drunken, psychologically disturbed coke slut was absurd to the point of being laughable. But would this be obvious to the judges?

  Obara’s defense was a concoction of opportunistic manipulations, distortions, and, in some cases, outright lies. The lies were not surprising: what was most sickening was the core of truth visible through the glaze of elaboration. Obara knew a painful amount about Lucie, intimate things, which he could have heard only from her in person. Whatever had really happened in the hours they spent alone, it was clear that they had talked at length and that Lucie had shared with him secrets that she would have entrusted to very few people.

  Obara’s account continued on to the following day, Sunday, July 2. By this time, the prosecutors asserted, Lucie was already dead or dying. According to him, she was vigorously alive and continuing her drug-fueled binge. Obara traveled by train to Tokyo, but Lucie chose to remain behind in the apartment, working her way through her supply of pills. In the evening, he phoned from his apartment in the city, and “she started talking about strange things—I thought she was overdosing.” He rang a few hospital emergency departments in case Lucie needed medical treatment and got back to the room in Zushi shortly before midnight. “I told Lucie that she h
ad taken too many drugs, and that she should go to hospital in Tokyo,” he said. “But Lucie was reluctant to go for fear that if the drugs were detected, she might be deported.”

  What Obara told the court next was the most chilling thing of all, not because it was a lie but again because of what was true. “My neck was aching from the car accident and I was not feeling well, so I became irritated with Lucie ignoring my advice,” he said. “Lucie then kept repeating some very bad jokes. She said, ‘Jane’s side of the family is cursed. They have a defect of the brain. Jane’s mother died at the age of forty-one. Jane’s sister died at the age of thirty-one.’”

  The family history was accurate. Had Obara gleaned this by remote control, from British detectives at work in Sevenoaks? Or was it a measure of how he had worked upon Lucie, and how far he had drawn her out, to have learned such secrets during the course of that evening?

  “She kept saying, ‘There is a curse,’” Obara continued. “She said, ‘Jane’s mother died at the age of forty-one. Jane’s sister died at the age of thirty-one. Jane’s daughter will die at the age of twenty-one. And Jane’s granddaughter will die at the age of eleven.’ She kept repeating these bad jokes, and I became irritated. So I contacted a certain person and said that there was a foreign hostess who had overdosed on drugs, and asked him to take her home. This person was Mr. A.”

  * * *

  According to Obara, he went back to Tokyo on Monday morning. Before leaving Zushi Marina, he had left some food out for the stoned Lucie and told her that someone would be coming over to take her home. He hid the money for Mr. A in a lambskin slipper by the entrance to the apartment.