CRIME: People Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie BlackmanBy Richard Lloyd Parry Cape, 404pp. £17.99
'EVEN AFTER YEARS and decades have passed," writes Richard Lloyd Parry, the Asia editor of the Timesof London, who is based in Tokyo, "you never get over the excitement, the unique daily thrill, of living as a foreigner in Japan."
At first one wonders whether it will ever be possible to penetrate the inscrutability of traditional Japanese formality. I remember the solemn intellectual enthusiasm of Juzo Fukunaka, my Japanese interpreter long ago, who had read English at Waseda University. He patiently tried to explain the Japanese aesthetics of austerity, even in times of prosperity, the superiority of less, how the emptiness of a room with straw mats and paper windowpanes enhanced contemplation of a bonsai dwarf tree in a prayer niche; why a haiku poem had to consist of 17 syllables, neither more nor fewer; how a garden of symmetrically raked gravel and a single asymmetrical rock helped Zen Buddhist monks to understand the meaning of existence. Juzo introduced me to a member of an association known as the Atomic Bomb Casualty Sufferers, whose unreproachful courtesy, as he showed me his radiation keloid scars, made me feel embarrassed and apologetic. It was difficult, at first, to believe that the Japanese I met were related to the barbarians who starved prisoners of war to death on the Burma railway.
Parry’s masterly account of sexual crime in modern Tokyo is a convincing corrective for any lingering delusions of oriental romanticism. Japan used to keep its red-light districts carefully delineated; now, as Parry reveals, the lines are blurred. Among the 30 million inhabitants of Greater Tokyo are “obscure excitement and mysterious possibilities”. In the inner city area called Roppongi are many small, expensive bars where frustrated businessmen pay hostesses ostensibly only for conversation, flattery and flirtation; the platonic relationships established there often lead to greater intimacy elsewhere after hours, however. And danger. Parry comprehensively covers what happens in Roppongi and beyond. A conscientious investigative reporter, he spent time under cover in a hostess bar, as a barman. He seems to have learned all about it that there is to learn. While revealing Roppongi’s system and hazards, exemplified by a large number of fatalities, he concentrates on the most horrific and notorious case of all.
Lucie Blackman was brought up near Sevenoaks, an upmarket English commuter town in Kent. Her father, Tim Blackman, failed to manage an inherited shoe shop but made a go of developing properties when that sort of enterprise used to be easy. Her mother, Jane, dropped out of school at 15. Lucie was a pretty child with blond hair and blue eyes, gregarious and bright but not too bright. Well educated up to A-levels but uninterested in going on to university, she worked briefly as an assistant to a dealer in a French investment bank in the City of London, then as a British Airways flight attendant. When long-haul flights did not exhaust her she enjoyed shopping and late-night clubbing, and ran up some frightening credit-card liabilities. It must have been easy for her best friend, Louise, to persuade her they should go to Tokyo, where, they hoped, they could earn enough in three months to clear their debts.
As the book’s photographs show, Lucie was no beauty, but she was an English blonde with blue eyes and long legs. At the age of 21 she personified the erotic fantasy of the typical affluent Tokyo businessman reluctant to go home immediately after work. Many Japanese are Anglophiles. Their Anglophilia made Lucie especially welcome in Roppongi. She was a fairly attractive, well-groomed, chatty, naive cosmopolitan, eager to make a lot of money in a hurry, an ideal hostess.
She and Louise shared a small room in a slummy establishment they called the shithouse and considered themselves lucky when a man very much like a pimp quickly got them jobs in a bar named Casablanca, which, “to a certain Japanese eye”, in Parrys words, “had a crepuscular allure”. Their duties were simply to pour the clients’ whiskies and water, light their cigarettes and massage their egos. But hostesses were encouraged to augment their salaries with substantial bonuses by accompanying their patrons outside, supposedly to restaurant dinners. As Lucie and Louise were in Japan on visitors’ visas, working illegitimately, their employers’ wishes were irresistible. How stupid could a hostess get? Very.
Parry devotes a lot of space to a detailed account of Japan’s ill treatment of Koreans, the exceptionally successful career of a Korean who made a fortune with car parks, taxis and pachinko parlours, and the heir who changed his name to Joji Obara and his nationality to Japanese, and became a monstrous sexual predator. Lucie was only one of a series of bar hostesses he took out to his seaside apartment, drugged and raped. She was evidently the only victim that he cut up with a chainsaw and buried in a seaside cave.
Much of this thoroughly researched book tells of Lucie’s father’s attempts to find her killer, by visiting Tokyo repeatedly, appealing to the international media, spending a good deal of money, enlisting the support of Tony Blair and attempting to galvanise the lethargic and inefficient Tokyo police. The book is very well written, appalling and absolutely enthralling. It should make young women think at least twice when considering get-rich-quick employment in exotic lands.
Patrick Skene Catling has written novels and children’s books
