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

  Even true friends found it difficult to broach the subject with one another. Jane described how her circles of acquaintances shrank, as people she had formerly known well confronted an uncommon challenge of social etiquette: What do you say to the woman whose daughter has recently been chopped up and buried in a cave?

  Lucie’s friend Caroline Lawrence came back to Sevenoaks for the Christmas after her disappearance and avoided all her old friends. “I didn’t want to see, hear, think about it,” she said. “I didn’t go out at all. Once, I saw Sophie passing in the street and I hid. So selfish, but I couldn’t bring myself to talk to her.” It wasn’t only the struggle to find appropriate words for Sophie. Her jolting physical resemblance to her sister, which became more pronounced as the years went by, gave more than one person the sensation of standing in the presence of the dead.

  Sophie detected this, and her anger at the arbitrariness of such treatment (was she to be punished for resembling her sister?) increased her loneliness. She felt like a ghost for so much of the time anyway; she didn’t need to see it in the eyes of others. Two years after Lucie’s death, Sophie became conscious of having crossed an appalling threshold. It dawned on her that in the passing of time she had become older than her own older sister. It was impossible to explain to anyone how strange and desolating that felt.

  * * *

  Obara’s libel case against me was dismissed by the Tokyo District Court in September 2007. He made an appeal to the High Court, and that too was thrown out eight months later. Perhaps he never expected to win; the point may not have been to prove himself right but simply to harry and intimidate me with a burden of time, paperwork, and expense. Japanese courts, in defamation actions, do not award costs against an unsuccessful plaintiff, and the legal bill for defending the action was £60,000, or about $90,000. The Times covered this without a flicker of hesitation or hint of reproach. A threshold had been crossed now, although this became obvious to me only later. For years, I had regarded the story from the detached and privileged distance of a reporter; now it had stepped up and tapped me on the shoulder. Japanese friends, in particular, wondered aloud if I should not ease off on my reporting of the case. But it was impossible to contemplate going back now.

  I was not the only object of Obara’s complaints. He sued, and won damages from, several Japanese weekly magazines, and from Time magazine, which in 2002 had made the mistake of reporting that he had associations with the yakuza. How could a bankrupt afford these expensive actions, on top of his retinue of criminal lawyers, private detectives, webmasters, and publishers, and the large disbursements of “condolence money”? The answer was his family. Control of Obara’s assets had been passed to relatives, including his mother, Kimiko, now in her eighties; it was them, or their agents, who settled his lavish legal bills. I had heard that Kimiko was alive and still lived in the house where Obara had grown up. The youngest of her sons, Kosho Hoshiyama, also lived in Osaka, where he worked as a dentist and avoided journalists. Then there was the third brother, the aspirant writer, who called himself Eisho Kin. None of the family had ever attended the trial or given an on-the-record interview. Apart from submitting their bills, even Obara’s lawyers had only fleeting and infrequent contact with them. From Tokyo I took the bullet train to Osaka in search of the Kim-Kin-Hoshiyama family.

  The cab I caught from the station was owned by Kokusai Takushii—International Taxis, the firm, still owned by Kimiko, on which the family fortune had been built. I went to the plot of land where Obara had planned to build his bubble tower and found it occupied by an empty multistory car park. I found the home where the family had first lived, a shabby house on an alley off a cheap shopping street. It too was deserted; around the corner, one of the family pachinko parlors was shuttered and dark. From there I went to the rich residential district of Kitabatake, where houses were still built in the traditional style, with high walls of clay-covered brick and heavy front gateways roofed in tiles. In front of one of these was a plate bearing the name of Obara’s mother. I pressed the button on the intercom, and after a long wait, the voice of an elderly lady answered.

  “Is that Mrs. Kim?”

  “She’s not here,” the voice said faintly.

  “You’re not Mrs. Kim?”

  “I’m the housekeeper.”

  “When will Mrs. Kim be back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I was fairly sure that this was Mrs. Kim.

  As I walked away, a man came out of the next-door gate. He was about fifty years old, wore a crumpled white shirt untucked over black trousers, and carried two plastic bags stuffed with rubbish or dirty laundry. He walked at frantic speed, his head tilted forward. I knew that this must be Eisho Kin.

  “Mr. Kin!” I called out as I trotted to catch him up. “Mr. Kin, may I speak to you?” He paused and turned as I introduced myself, and with the introduction he became immediately enraged. I was used to situations where my presence as a reporter was not welcomed, but Eisho Kin was one of the angriest people I had ever met. There were no preliminaries to his outburst, no buildup of irritation. As soon as I had handed him my business card and identified myself, he simply exploded with fury.

  “I am a publisher!” he snarled, apropos of nothing in particular. “You should read my books!”

  “Well, Mr. Kin, I read your story, about the Korean man and the deaf boys,” I said. “I was interested by it. Could I talk to you sometime?”

  “I haven’t seen my brother for thirty years,” he said. “If you ever come back here, I will take certain measures. I don’t want you to come any closer to me.” Mr. Kin stopped, and I stopped too. But he kept talking, placing his bags on the pavement and jabbing his finger at me with rolling eyes.

  “If these girls come to a foreign country and follow a guy, a guy who isn’t good-looking, to his apartment—what do you really think about that? Why would she do that?”

  “Well, I don’t know, Mr. Kin. If you mean Lucie Blackman, she thought that Mr. Obara was going to give her a present.”

  “You are stupid!” he said, and he was pacing ahead again with his bags, looking back over his shoulder at me as I tried to keep up. “It’s absurd. You must have bigger issues to pick up than this minor thing. What about global warming?”

  “Well, I write about various issues—”

  “How many times have you seen in Thailand a beautiful girl with some ugly guy?”

  “Quite often, I sup—”

  “It’s a waste of time.”

  “I’m sorry if—”

  “Are you doing this for money?”

  “It’s my job, if that’s what you mean. I—”

  “My father was in prison for two and a half years,” he said in English. He had stopped walking again and put down his bags. “He was resistance, fighting the Japanese. But the only thing I can blame him is, he has no time to take care of the family. But he always said the importance of education.”

  I nodded in a way that I hoped would communicate empathy and understanding.

  “I don’t go abroad, but I speak Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and English.”

  I kept nodding.

  “I’m not rich,” he said. “The Japanese media say that my brother is the property tycoon of eastern Japan. Such stupid…” He waved his hand in disgust.

  “Don’t come here again,” he said. “Never come back. Never come close to me. If you come back, I’ll take certain measures.”

  “Mr. Kin, I don’t wish to bother you, I just have a few…”

  He was stamping away down the street with his rubbish or laundry, still muttering and shaking his head as he went.

  * * *

  In March 2007, a month before the verdict in the Tokyo District Court, a twenty-two-year-old British woman named Lindsay Hawker was murdered in Tokyo’s eastern suburbs. She was a teacher of English. One Sunday, she went to the apartment of a twenty-eight-year-old man named Tatsuya Ichihashi after giving him a conversation lesson and never returned home. When the
police called there the following day, Ichihashi fled from them in his stockinged feet. The officers found Lindsay buried in a soil-filled bathtub. She had been beaten, raped, and throttled.

  Her father, Bill Hawker, a driving instructor from the Midlands, flew out to Japan to identify her body and bring it home. Like Tim Blackman before him, he gave a press conference, at a hotel close to Narita Airport. The circumstances were different, of course: unlike Lucie, Lindsay’s fate was immediately known, and the only mystery was the whereabouts of her killer. But in Bill Hawker I recognized the model of the grieving parent, the role in which circumstances had cast Tim Blackman, and that he had always refused to play.

  Bill Hawker was a man possessed by pain, quite incapable of calculation or control. Grief for his daughter overwhelmed anger at her killer. It was hard to look at him. It seemed shameful that he should be required to weep and choke before strangers, and heartless to ask questions. We asked them anyway, and the camera flashes illuminated the twisted mask of his face. Bill Hawker was everything that Tim had not been, and everything the world expected of a man in his situation: broken, helpless, turned inside out by loss.

  Tatsuya Ichihashi, meanwhile, had vanished in his socks: it would be thirty-two months before the police caught up with him. It turned out that he had a history of approaching foreign women and had followed Lindsay home one evening after encountering her on a station platform. The nationality of the victim and the method of disposing of the body made it an extraordinary and freakish crime, and yet, for many people, there was something naggingly appropriate about the fact that this murder had taken place in Tokyo.

  How many times foreigners—in Japan and in Britain—commented on “how Japanese” Lindsay Hawker’s death was, without ever being able to say exactly why. The case spoke to unarticulated but deep-seated stereotypes. A jumble of images and ideas were called to mind, involving stalkers, repressed and perverted sexuality, pornographic comic books, and notions about the way Japanese men regarded Western women. It was as if, far from being an appalling aberration, the death of Lindsay Hawker was an accident waiting to happen. Japanese too had an anxious sense of this, especially since Bill Hawker’s pronouncement at the press conference that the murder of his daughter had “brought shame on your country.” That weekend, Japanese television nervously sent a film crew onto the streets of London to ask passersby whether Lindsay’s death had sullied their image of Japan.

  The sense of déjà vu, of course, was a result of Lucie’s case, and as the years passed, people became so confused between the British girl buried in the cave and the British girl in the bathtub that they came to seem like a single incident. But apart from the country where they occurred, the nationality and youth of the victims were all that the crimes had in common. Two women had been killed, seven years apart—that was all. And yet for many people the compulsion to draw conclusions from their deaths, about Japan and Japanese people as a whole, was irresistible.

  In the media, much of this generalization was concerned with Japanese sexuality and particularly the imagined tastes of Japanese men. The chikan, gropers who operated on crowded trains, were cited, as were Japan’s “infamously” pornographic manga comics, with their representations of wide-eyed foreign-looking beauties vigorously violated by frowning salarymen. Former gaijin English teachers and hostesses were wheeled out by the newspapers to tell “horrifying” stories of Japanese stalkers. “What is the fascination that Western women seem to hold for Japanese men?” asked one tabloid reporter, who found his answers on a pub crawl through Roppongi.

  “They look down upon us, yet at the same time they look up to us, if that makes sense,” one 24-year-old language teacher from Liverpool told me as she drank with friends in a bar at the start of the weekend.

  “It makes it difficult for us to really understand them. I’ve been trying to translate their behaviour for the entire year that I’ve been here and I still don’t know how to read them.” While some British women described the attitude of the men they encounter here as strange, uncomfortable and unpredictable, others talked of the awe and mystique Western women hold for the Japanese male.

  Taller, more independent and liberated than their female Japanese counterparts, they are regarded with a curious combination of attraction, fear and disapproval … “They view the more beautiful Western women, particularly the taller ones, as goddesses,” says a British woman working for a Tokyo stockbroking firm who was with friends in Roppongi’s Hub Bar last night … “The Japanese are so very different to us that I wonder sometimes if we will ever really understand them.”

  The implication of all this was spelled out in the story’s headline: “Japanese Men, Smoky Bars and the Obsession with Beautiful Western Girls That Cost Lindsay Her Life.”

  Japan has a population more than double that of Britain, but in 2005 it recorded 2.56 million crimes, fewer than half the 5.6 million reported in England and Wales. Most remarkably, only 3.5 percent of these were crimes of violence, compared to 21 percent in Britain. How many young British women had been murdered in New York, Johannesburg, or Moscow in the years separating the deaths of Lucie Blackman and Lindsay Hawker? Nobody was interested in finding out. By the standards of any comparably developed Western nation, Tokyo is a fantastically safe place to live: break-ins are rare, car theft is virtually unknown, and women can walk the streets alone, without anxiety, at all times of the day and night. One of the reasons why Japan’s police frequently appeared so bumbling was that they had so little practice fighting real crime.

  The notion that Japanese men are “obsessed” with Western women is a racist cliché: cocky, skirt-chasing foreign men with an appetite for Japanese girls are far more in evidence than the famous gropers. Japanese pornography and manga are unique in their style, but the idea that the Japanese masturbators are greater consumers of porn than their counterparts in the West is contradicted by all the facts. And anyone who believes that this is a sexually repressed country has only to spend a Friday night among the Roppongi girls, who feed on foreign men with equal enthusiasm and appetite.

  What makes Japan “so very different”? Not merely the characters on the signs and the faces of the people. There is something far deeper, a fugitive quality, difficult to put into words, the source of so much of the pleasure, as well as the frustration, of the life of the gaijin: a drastic unfamiliarity about the atmosphere of the streets, gesture of individuals, and the emotion of the crowd. An intense and thrilling energy drives Tokyo, but it is narrowly channeled by constraints of convention and conformity. The closest most people come to identifying this is to talk of Japanese “restraint” and “politeness,” and it greatly complicates the business of reading people and understanding situations.

  Japanese men rarely make the overt displays of aggressive masculinity that Westerners deploy to impress or intimidate. They seldom preen or strut; almost all of the time, they are the opposite of menacing and sinister. To newcomers like Lindsay or Lucie, with no command of Japanese, they appeared “sweet,” “shy,” often “boring.” In fifteen years, I have seen only two fistfights in Japan. Each one exploded out of nowhere, with no preliminary shouting or goading or facing off, and came to an end with equal abruptness.

  The effect of this, for many foreigners, is to disable instincts of caution and suspicion that guide and protect them at home. This is what united Lindsay Hawker with Lucie Blackman, conventional, “respectable” Englishwomen who would not have contemplated going to the apartment of a strange British man or working as a hostess in a London nightclub. Japan felt safe; Japan was safe; and under its enchantment they made decisions that they would never have made anywhere else.

  Why did Lucie go to the apartment in Zushi with Joji Obara? Even those closest to her wondered whether she had not been foolish. “To go off with a man like that is just silly,” her brother, Rupert, said. “I’ve always thought it was a very avoidable situation. If I try to imagine myself in her shoes, there’s always a point along that journey where
I would have said, ‘Enough’s enough. I’m not coming inside.’” But to Lucie herself, the events of that day would have flowed quite naturally. It was part of her assailant’s cunning, perhaps, to avoid ever confronting her with a decision that aroused doubt or caution.

  Meeting men in her own time was a hostess’s job, and Lucie, struggling to meet her dōhan quota, close to being sacked, needed regular customers more than most. Then there was the promise of the mobile phone, which would have brought ease and convenience to her work, her friendships, and, especially, to her new love affair. About Obara himself, there was nothing obviously threatening. With his good English and his visible wealth, he was distinctly more desirable than many of Casablanca’s clientele. And the original arrangement had been for nothing more than lunch, after all. It was Obara who had arrived so late and who proposed, out of nowhere, a journey to that homely, unmenacing, and comfortingly British-sounding place—“the seaside.”

  Lucie would have had little sense of how far, or in which direction, the seaside lay. By the time they reached it, after an uneventful drive, it was too late to worry about. Obara made no attempt to rush her into the apartment—first came the photographs by the sea and then, perhaps, the reasonable suggestion that, since it was so late, they might order in food rather than going to a restaurant. Once inside the apartment, the promised mobile phone was quickly handed over and activated. No one knew what happened next. The court made no detailed finding, and Joji Obara was acquitted of causing Lucie’s death. But, after such a day with such a man, would it have seemed incautious or unusual to have accepted a glass of champagne, to have raised a toast, and to have drunk?