Book description
Lucie Blackman - tall, blonde, and twenty-one years old - stepped out
into the vastness of Tokyo in the summer of 2000, and disappeared
forever. The following winter, her dismembered remains were found buried
in a seaside cave.
The seven months in between had seen a massive search for the missing
girl, involving Japanese policemen, British private detectives,
Australian dowsers and Lucie's desperate, but bitterly divided, parents.
As the case unfolded, it drew the attention of prime ministers and
sado-masochists, ambassadors and con-men, and reporters from across the
world. Had Lucie been abducted by a religious cult, or snatched by human
traffickers? Who was the mysterious man she had gone to meet? And what
did her work, as a 'hostess' in the notorious Roppongi district of
Tokyo, really involve?
Richard Lloyd Parry, an award-winning foreign correspondent, has
followed the case since Lucie's disappearance. Over the course of a
decade, he has travelled to four continents to interview those caught up
in the story, fought off a legal attack in the Japanese courts, and
worked undercover as a barman in a Roppongi strip club. He has talked
exhaustively to Lucie's friends and family and won unique access to the
Japanese detectives who investigated the case. And he has delved into
the mind and background of the man accused of the crime - Joji Obara,
described by the judge as 'unprecedented and extremely evil'.
With the finesse of a novelist, he reveals the astonishing truth about
Lucie and her fate. People Who Eat Darkness
is, by turns, a non-fiction thriller, a courtroom drama and the
biography of both a victim and a killer. It is the story of a young
woman who fell prey to unspeakabale evil, and of a loving family torn
apart by grief. And it is a fascinating insight into one of the world's
most baffling and mysterious societies, a light shone into dark corners
of Japan that the rest of the world has never glimpsed before.
Richard Lloyd Parry
is Asia editor of The Times
, based in Tokyo. He is the author of one previous book, In the Time
of Madness
, about Indonesia.
