num_pages: 465
description: An incisive and compelling account of the case of 21-year-old Lucie Blackman who 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 followed the case since Lucie's disappearance. Over the course of a decade he traveled 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 bartender in a Roppongi strip club. He talked exhaustively with Lucie's friends and family and won unique access to the Japanese detectives who investigated the case. And he 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 unspeakable 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.
language: English
title: 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
publisher: FSG Originals