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

  From his cell in the Tokyo Detention Center, Obara continued to direct his legal battles, suing the Yomiuri newspaper for libel and fighting a claim for unpaid fees from the publisher of the strange book with the dead dog on the cover. Shionoya talked about the appeal with modest confidence; there would be no verdict, he predicted, until the middle of 2011 at the earliest. But then, early in December 2010, Tim, Jane, and the Ridgways in Australia each received a telephone call from the Tokyo police with unexpected news. The appeal had been rejected by the Supreme Court. The guilty verdicts and the life sentence were now confirmed irrevocably; there was nowhere left for Joji Obara to run.* A life sentence in a Japanese court rarely means life, but on average the term served before parole is more than thirty years. Even counting the decade he served in detention, Joji Obara is unlikely to walk free before 2030, when he will be seventy-eight years old. As a convicted criminal, he was transferred to a prison with a regime drastically different from the detention center where he had lived since 2001. He shares a cell with other convicts; he is allowed none of the books and documents that furnished his life for the past decade. Visits are allowed just once a month, and even then only from members of his immediate family. Prisoners are not barred from seeing their lawyers, but permission must be obtained for each visit and is typically granted only once every few weeks.

  “Until now, Obara has been his own chief lawyer, but that is impossible for him in prison,” Shionoya told me. His legal team spent the last days before his incarceration huddled with their client, making hasty arrangements so that they could continue to manage his affairs without the daily contact to which they had grown accustomed.

  The prosecutors had not appealed to the Supreme Court, and so the single acquittal, on the charge of killing Lucie Blackman, stood. Jane held fast to her view that even the partial conviction of Obara was a victory, if not for Lucie then for Obara’s victims in general. It was true, of course, and yet emotionally it hardly mattered at all. Well before the conclusion of Obara’s trial, it had become impossible for those most closely connected with the case to hold it and all its details in mind.

  It was not that justice was unimportant. But it altered nothing, or nothing that really mattered. It was as if, after a frantic contest of strength between two equally determined and unyielding opponents, one had simply relaxed its grip and walked away. Lucie was still gone—and what could ever make a difference to that? Such a loss was unquenchable. What might have been consolations—arrest of suspect, trial, a guilty verdict, ¥100 million—evaporated into it like spoonfuls of water tossed into a desert. What if Obara had admitted guilt, begged forgiveness, wept out his black heart? What if he had been charged with murder, rather than manslaughter, and sentenced to hang? Imagine the most extreme vindication and retribution—nothing that mattered would be alleviated or improved by it. There was no satisfaction that could be imagined, only greater and lesser degrees of humiliation and pain. Lucie had been a unique being, a precious, beloved human creature. She was dead, and nothing would ever bring her back.

  All about me

  I would like a magic ring that

  would make me and my sister

  fairies. We could have a castle and

  flying ponys and powers.

  WHAT I REALLY AM. I am kind and quite sensible says mummy and daddy. I can get very cross with my sister and brother. I am very thoughtful to other people and helpful to other people. I do not like racing my work even though someone is racing me. I am not keen on playing in the playground. I hate to eat omelets and swede [rutabaga] and peas. They are all my worst. I will tell you the thing I do not like but not my worst.

  It is mushy peas.

  “I used to think all the time about what he did to her,” Jane said. “That was the worst thing of all—imagining Obara cutting up Lucie. My skull would want to burst with it; I thought I’d never get it out of my head. I’d hear a chain saw in a field, where someone was chopping down a tree, and I’d physically shake.” Jane had been to see a psychotherapist, and she had talked to the mothers of other murdered children in Japan as well as Britain. All were kind and sympathetic, but none of it helped. Then she was introduced to a treatment called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR, widely used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder in soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. It was a mysterious therapy that often worked dramatically for reasons that even its practitioners could not fully explain.

  “What would make you feel better?” the therapist asked during his first meeting with Jane.

  “Just to know that she’s safe,” she answered.

  “So then he told me to think of the horrible things that Obara did to Lucie,” Jane recalled. “And then I had to follow his fingers, and he moves his fingers from side to side. And I’m thinking about it, and he’s saying, ‘She is safe, she is safe…’ Jane attended four sessions, and they were the only treatment that did any good. “Now, when I’m sitting in court, and the interpreter’s going over these terrible things that Obara did, I repeat to myself, ‘She is safe, she is safe…’ and it helps. I think that was the turning point in saving me from going mad.”

  Jane said, “I don’t believe in this thing called ‘closure’ or ‘moving on.’ What do you close, and where do you move on to? You learn to live with it. But I’ll never be the same again. I can be in a supermarket and be feeling perfectly okay. And then I’ll see a little girl who reminds me of Lucie when she was tiny, and my eyes will well up with tears, and I have no control.” As the years passed, friends of Lucie had children of their own. Louise Phillips’s baby was christened Lucia, and Samantha Burman’s daughter was Grace Lucie. Jane was glad, and moved by the love of these young friends, but it was searing to be reminded of the kind of life Lucie would have enjoyed, if she had lived.

  * * *

  Jane hated everything about the Lucie Blackman Trust; in the war for possession of Lucie, it represented a devastating defeat. She hated the hypocrisy she saw in it—the good works of a father who had walked out, as Jane insisted, on his wife and children. Despite the conclusions of the British police and prosecutors, she still suspected it of concealing embezzlement and fraud. She wanted nothing to do with the trust and its work, but she still resented its existence and the way it had co-opted Lucie’s name without any reference to Jane.

  She found her own consolation in Lucie’s death, in a dark fatalism that viewed her daughter as the tool of an impersonal destiny—a death, as well as a life, preordained. “I’ve told you this before,” she said, “and I’m not making it up—but I knew that I would never see her again. I arranged for her to see a medium before she went to Japan, but she wouldn’t go. When she was little, she was always so grown up—in a way, she was like my mother. And I feel that this was her destiny, Lucie’s destiny. She was born for it. She was put on this earth to stop Obara. She wasn’t meant to make old bones.”

  Lucie had to die, in other words; her death had been inescapable, and Jane had foreseen it. She had been right again, and right to tell Lucie not to go to Japan. In all her sad story, from the death of her mother to her falling out with Sophie, Jane had not been wrong. Even in her choice of Tim, she had made no mistake, because the man she had married was not the husband who left her. “He was a different person,” Jane said. “The man I lived with for nineteen years didn’t exist.” It was the only way that the facts could be compelled to make any bearable sense.

  She was comforted at all times by an unwavering faith in Lucie’s continued presence. Jane attended sessions with a medium, a woman named Tracy who lived in the London suburb of Penge. “I went to see her, and Lucie came through,” Jane told me. “It was like I was speaking to Lucie for an hour. She was telling me things that she did—she said, ‘Lucie’s doing this with her hair, and you used to like stroking her hair.’ And I did, I did like stroking it. Cynics would think that she’s just saying that, but there were lots of things that she said, names that people just wouldn’t know … I don’t w
ant to talk about them, but I know it was Lucie.”

  Jane said: “I do talk to her, in my mind. We went for a walk a few months ago and we saw a lovely house for sale and made an appointment to have a look. I said to Lucie, ‘If you think this is right for us, give me some signs.’ The signs are always butterflies and stars. On the front door was a little printed sign that said, ‘Gone to the Beach.’ Well, that’s unusual, isn’t it, in the middle of the countryside? But the beach is where her body was found. Then we went inside and there were butterfly stickers all over the wall. Then upstairs there was a lampshade in the shape of a star, and in the garden there were butterflies dancing round, and a big topiary of a butterfly. So I said, ‘Okay, Lucie—thanks. We got the message.’”

  Once Jane saw a healer, who told her that a robin would come to her garden. As she had predicted, it appeared a few weeks later, lolloping across the lawn. Jane and Roger fed the robin; it quickly shed its fear and became almost a pet. “That’s Lucie,” the healer said, and Jane knew that it was true.

  It happened again on the day of the funeral, as Jane stepped out of the dark church into the light. Perched in a tree opposite the door was a blackbird, and as the service came to an end it fetched up a loud singing that filled the air above the graves. Lucie’s friends and family milled outside in small groups and gradually broke off and left the churchyard, while above them the blackbird trilled and fluted in the branches of the tree. “It started up as we were all walking out,” Jane remembered, “and I said to myself at once, ‘That’s Lucie.’ Everyone noticed, it was so loud. Tim even looked up at it and commented on it—‘Listen to that bird! Isn’t that bird making a lot of noise?’ I just smiled to myself.” And how sweet death would be, if it could all have ended there, with the image of a bird in a tree, pouring out its song.

  NOTES

  This book is a factual account, and the events recounted in it were observed by me, attested to by other witnesses, or documented by reliable written or broadcast sources. Inevitably, in a story like this, versions of some events differ. I have tried to distinguish between what is credible and what is not, and in cases where this is difficult, to say as much. Unless stated in the following notes, factual information and quotations are from personal correspondence, face-to-face interviews conducted by me, press conferences I attended, and documents in the personal archives of Tim Blackman, Annette Ridgway, Nigel Ridgway, and Jane Steare.

  Most of the hearings in Joji Obara’s trial and appeal were attended by Japanese researchers employed by me who took detailed notes on the proceedings. The official transcripts of Japanese criminal trials are not routinely available to journalists, but in many cases I have been able to obtain copies of these through other channels. I also consulted copies of the English-language reports on the trial hearings prepared for the victims and their families by the Tokyo Metropolitan Police.

  In a few cases, noted below, I have changed names and identifying details of people in this story. I have done so for three reasons: because anonymity was requested by the interviewee; because, for various reasons, I have been unable to contact the person concerned; and, as a matter of principle, for all living victims of sexual crime. For those in the last category, I have gone to some lengths to make it impossible for the person to be identified, even by close friends and relatives. In some cases, this has required me to alter biographical details, as well as names, although I have preserved chronology. None of these changes have any bearing on the principal subjects of this story.

  The ordering of personal names is a complicated matter in a narrative that includes Japanese, Korean, and Korean-Japanese names, sometimes for the same person. I have followed the style commonly used in English-language newspapers. All Japanese and Korean-Japanese names are in the Western order: given name first, family name second. Korean names are in the traditional order: family name first, personal name (or names) second. So in the names Joji Obara, Seisho Kin, and Kim Sung Jong, the family name is Obara, Kin, and Kim, respectively.

  The phrase “people who eat darkness” is inspired by Toru Matsugaki, Yami o Kuu Hitobito (Tokyo, 2006). I am very grateful to Mr. Matsugaki for his warm support.

  PROLOGUE: LIFE BEFORE DEATH

  “Something has happened to Lucie”: Mail on Sunday, July 16, 2000.

  “I asked what was known of the client”: “Lucie Jane Blackman—Report as of Close of Play 4 July 2000,” British embassy memo by Iain Ferguson, vice-consul.

  RULES

  a twenty-one-day training course: Details of the British Airways training course are from my interview with Lucie’s BA colleagues Ben and Sarah Guest.

  Jim, Robert, and Greg are pseudonyms.

  HIGH TOUCH TOWN

  “Life here means never taking life for granted”: Donald Richie, The Japan Journals, 1947–2004 (Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2004), p. 280.

  GEISHA GIRL! (JOKE)

  Hajime Imura is a pseudonym.

  Ichiro Watanabe is a pseudonym.

  The novelist Mo Hayder worked as a hostess: Janice Turner, “My Life as a Tokyo Bar Hostess,” The Times, May 7, 2004.

  Helen Dove is a pseudonym.

  For the history of paid female companionship in Japan, see Liza Dalby, Geisha (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), and Edward Seidensticker, Tokyo Rising: The City Since the Great Earthquake (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). Seidensticker’s observation about the decline of the geisha is on pp. 54–55.

  Roppongi began to emerge as a place of recreation: For the history of Roppongi, see Seidensticker, Tokyo Rising, and Robert Whiting, Tokyo Underworld: The Fast Times and Hard Life of an American Gangster in Japan (New York: Vintage, 1999).

  the slogan on the walls of the Roppongi expressway: To the regret of many habitués of Roppongi, the “High Touch Town” sign was removed in 2008.

  Anne Allison was: Anne Allison, Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). The quotations in this chapter are from pp. 160 and 48.

  “We were taught three things when we started”: Anne Allison, “Personal Services,” The Times, July 14, 2000.

  Kenji Suzuki is a pseudonym.

  TOKYO IS THE EXTREME LAND

  Kai Miyazawa is a pseudonym; Club Kai is not the real name.

  “Some hostesses don’t consider themselves part of the mizu shōbai”: Quoted in Evan Alan Wright, “Death of a Hostess,” Time, May 14, 2001.

  “There is something dirty about [the hostess]”: Allison, Nightwork, pp. 173–74.

  “She was deliriously happy”: Quoted in Paul Henderson, “I Told Lucie I Loved Her—They Were the Last Words We Ever Spoke Together,” Mail on Sunday, July 30, 2000.

  SOMETHING TERRIBLE HAS HAPPENED

  There are two versions of the conversation: They are based on interviews with Rupert Blackman, Sophie Blackman, Tim Blackman, Valerie Burman, Josephine Burr, and Jane Steare.

  the confusion of the reporters was evident: John Coles, “BA Girl Lucie ‘Held as Cult Sex Slave,’” Sun, July 11, 2000; Mark Dowdney and Lucy Rock, “Snatched by a Cult,” Mirror, July 11, 2000; Richard Lloyd Parry, “Missing Hostess Vanished after Meeting at Club,” Independent, July 11, 2000; “Japanese Journalists Fear the Mob May Be Involved,” Sevenoaks Chronicle, July 20, 2000.

  The embassy press secretary had earlier advised: Letter to Tim Blackman from Sue Kinoshita, press and public affairs officer, British Embassy, July 12, 2000.

  At school, Tim played the four-string banjo: Stephen Pritchard, “Why I Took ‘100 Million Pieces of Silver’ for My Daughter’s Death,” Observer, April 29, 2007.

  There was much lurid reporting: Frank Thorne, “Peril of Jap Vice Trap,” People, July 16, 2000; Gary Ralston, “21st Century Geisha Girls,” Daily Record, July 14, 2000; John Coles, “From High Life to Hostess,” Sun, July 13, 2000.

  the headlines told a much more compelling human tale: “I Will Never Leave Japan Without My Lucie, I Just Pray That She’
s Safe,” Daily Express, July 13, 2000; John Coles, “I’m Not Leaving Without My Sis,” Sun, July 13, 2000; “Family Pleas for ‘Cult’ Woman,” Daily Telegraph, July 13, 2000; John Coles, “Why Us?,” Sun, July 14, 2000.

  the effigy of a giant white rabbit: Sadly, the Diamond Hotel has since been demolished and rebuilt, and its animatronic bunny is nowhere to be seen.

  UNINTELLIGIBLE SPEECH

  Tony Blair met Tim and Sophie: Contemporary newspaper reports; British embassy, Tokyo, “Consular Case: Missing British Citizen: Miss Lucie Blackman—Notes of Main Points in Case and Actions Taken by Embassy,” August 2, 2000.

  Tania is a pseudonym.

  Dozens of calls began to come in to the Lucie Hotline: These and other calls to the Lucie Hotline are from a memo in the possession of Tim Blackman, dated July 31, 2000, and a document sent to Tim Blackman from the British vice-consul, Iain Ferguson, October 13, 2000.

  claimed to have supernatural gifts: Details about Jane’s state of mind at this time, and the information supplied by the psychics, are from interviews with Jane Steare; e-mails to Sophie Blackman from Jane Steare on July 26, 27, and 29, and August 2, 2000; and a fax from N. T. Crowther to Josephine Burr, July 26, 2000.

  Tim asked the Tokyo Metropolitan Police: From British embassy, Tokyo, “Consular Case: Missing British Citizen.”

  He wrote to Tony Blair: Letter from Tim Blackman to Tony Blair, July 28, 2000.

  THE FLICKERING LIGHT

  The next day, a Saturday, Tim received a telephone call: The section on Mike Hills is based on letters and documents supplied by Tim Blackman, including e-mail and fax correspondence from Hills, and Tim’s statement to the Essex police, October 31, 2000; on interviews with Tim Blackman, Adam Whittington, and Sophie Blackman; and on British newspaper coverage of the kidnapping of Paul Winder in 2000, and of the arrest, trial, and conviction of Mike Hills in 2003.