People Who Eat Darkness: Richard Lloyd Parry

People Who Eat Darkness
Richard Lloyd Parry
454pp


"Japan's a safe country"

"Women can walk around in the middle of the night and not worry"

These are common enough stereotypes that you might even hear from an ex-pat that has spent a number of years living in Japan, and they holds some truth. I might have even said something like it myself before.

But darkness can be found even in the land of the rising sun.

Richard Lloyd Parry knows it too, maybe as well as anyone, after working the Tokyo beat as a journalist starting in 1995. Parry had as close a view of the crimes surrounding the disappearance of Lucie Blackman and the insane, unbelievable if it hadn't been true, investigation and trial that followed it.

For anyone unfamiliar with the case, a bit of background (I'll avoid major spoilers, but the book itself is far more than just the details anyway), Lucie Blackman was a young English woman who went missing while living and working in Tokyo in the year 2000. This led to the revelation to her family that in actuality, Lucie had been working at a hostess club, far from the type of work her parents had pictured.

Now, hostesses are not sex workers, but the work is certainly the selling of a sexual image in the very least, as it almost always involves selling your time outside the clubs to date and spend time with important customers.

When it became apparent that something very odd was happening, some of Lucy's family rushed to Tokyo in an attempt to pressure the police to do more and this begins the story that will lead to battles between the Blackman's and the Japanese Police, the narrowing down of a suspect, and the eventual, though delayed, finding of a young woman's body.

Simple cut and dry case?

Not at all.

A life too short.

There are so many twists and turns along the way that I'm not sure I could be trusted to even attempt to list them all, and all that detail gives us a heavy book, but, if I haven't hinted enough already, one that a reader will not want to skip a single page of, or put down for any longer than it takes to get enough sleep.

Parry shows his ability to take a jumble of information and put it all down in the best way for a reader to feel that they haven't missed anything, but haven't been bogged down either. The writing is fluid, intelligent, and always intriguing. Parry leads us on an incredible walk, one in which we often want to close our eyes, but always take peeks between the slits of our fingers to catch a glimpse of the monster.

And what a monster it is... but I did promise not to spoil anything, didn't I.

Suffice it to say that Parry found in Kanto a character in Joji Obara that belongs in the works of Thomas Harris.

However, maybe the most incredible part of this book, is that the darkness eater and his horrible crimes don't become the soul focus. Instead, two more amazing stories emerge.

Parry spends a large part of the book humanizing Lucy's father, who might have instead been easily tossed aside as a 2D minor villain or a simple schmuck. While the news at the time seemed to have decided that Tim Blackman was not the grieving father he ought to have been, Parry doesn't leave it at that, and spends time filling any the blanks and painting the picture that was glossed over too often in initial coverage.

Finally, along with all of that, Parry is able to wind in the story of the Tokyo police. Are the misunderstood by the foreign media? Highly Inept? Or playing a game that only they know the rules to? Along with all the other wonderful parts expounded upon above to recommend this book, anyone interested in the case of Carlos Ghosn might find this work an amazing insight into the workings of Japanese police investigation and the criminal process as well.


 This is an incredible book and Parry a worthy journalist and author. In his later work, Ghosts of the Tsunami, Parry took the deaths of thousands and found the small story within all those stories. Here, with just one young lady's death, (Oh, but maybe not) Parry shows finds the big story.


A masterpiece of true crime writing.

One of the only photos of Joji Obara