People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the S

Description: People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry In 2000, a tall, blonde, 21-year-old went missing in Tokyo, and her remains were found several months later. Questions arose about her friendships, her career, and her intentions. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description Lucie Blackman--tall, blond, 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. Richard Lloyd Parry, an award-winning foreign correspondent, covered Lucies disappearance and followed the massive search for her, the long investigation, and the even longer trial. Over ten years, he earned the trust of her family and friends, won unique access to the Japanese detectives and Japans convoluted legal system, and delved deep into the mind of the man accused of the crime, Joji Obara, described by the judge as "unprecedented and extremely evil." The result is a book at once thrilling and revelatory, "In Cold Blood for our times" (Chris Cleave, author of Incendiary and Little Bee). People Who Eat Darkness is one of Publishers Weeklys Top 10 Books of 2012 Author Biography Richard Lloyd Parry is the Asia editor and Tokyo bureau chief of The Times (London) and the author of In the Time of Madness. Review "Richard Lloyd Parrys remarkable examination of [this] crime, what it revealed about Japanese society and how it unsettled conventional notions of bereavement, elevates his book above the genre. People Who Eat Darkness is a searing exploration of evil and trauma, and how both ultimately elude understanding or resolution . . . Just as the grief of Blackmans parents is unassaugeable, Obara and his motives are unknowable. That is the darkness at the heart of this book, one Lloyd Parry conveys with extraordinary effect and emotion . . . People Who Eat Darkness is a fascinating mediation that does not pretend to offer pat answers to obscene mysteries." --Susan Chira, The New York Times Book Review "Americans have an advantage in reading People Who Eat Darkness: we are less likely to know about Lucie Blackman. The blond Brit was 21 when she disappeared in Japan in 2000; the months-long search for her made headlines in both Japan and England. Unlike readers there, we have an extra level of suspense?we dont know what happened to Lucie?although we will by the middle of this masterful literary true crime story, which earns its comparisons to Truman Capotes In Cold Blood and Norman Mailers The Executioners Song . . . Like the case of Etan Patz, the Lucie Blackman disappearance captured the public imagination. By writing about it in such culturally informed detail, Parry subtly encourages an understanding that goes past the headlines. It is a dark, unforgettable ride." --Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Time "[In People Who Eat Darkness], Mr. Parry finds his voice, and its a sturdy one. His book becomes not merely an exemplary piece of reportage but a sustained and quietly profound work of moral inquiry as well. It becomes ominous in ways that go well beyond the calculated shock value of its cover . . . Mr. Parry writes exceedingly well . . . [and] People Who Eat Darkness is surprisingly soulful, especially in its portrait of Ms. Blackman . . . Hes restored her to life in this vivid book." --Dwight Garner, The New York Times "People Who Eat Darkness is a factual account, but it is as compelling as any thriller. The narrative gallops along, with dramatic twists, turns and half-resolutions. Joji Obara, Lucies abductor and apparent murderer, is every bit as brilliant and terrifying as the fictional Hannibal Lecter . . . The authors discussion of the effects of Lucies murder on Tim and the rest of the Blackman family is intimate, sensitive and chilling . . . intelligent, compassionate." --Melanie Kirkpatrick, The Wall Street Journal "One of the best books of the Year" --The Economist, The Guardian, and New Statesman "Parry is a sensitive, knowledgeable guide through the murky world of Japanese hostess clubs . . . A thoughtful book about an inevitably sensational subject . . . Methodically present[s] a nightmare that engulfs an entire city: the police, the shady networks of semilegal businesses whose economic livelihood is threatened by the investigation, and a riveted public whose taste for true crime stories is questioned." --Gregory Leon Miller, San Francisco Chronicle "Clear-eyed, thorough reporting on the Japanese underworld . . . Parry . . . mak[es] the reader feel not like a voyeur, but a witness to this deeply human tragedy that illustrates how a single murder creates many victims and proves that the seemingly distant political past can continue to influence individual lives into the present day." --Elyssa East, The Boston Globe "People Who Eat Darkness is an exceptionally perceptive and nuanced look at a terrible crime, one that put nations, institutions and family members at odds, and often into bitter and toxic conflict . . . [L]ike Capote, [the author is] less interested in dishing the eerie or lurid details than he is in exploring the penumbra of the crime, the complex factors that fed into it and the unpredictable effects it had on an ever-spreading network of people." --Laura Miller, Salon.com "A big, ambitious true crime book in the tradition of Norman Mailers The Executioners Song and Truman Capotes In Cold Blood." --Esquire "A masterpiece of writing this surely is, but it is more than that--it is a committed, compassionate, courageous act of journalism that changes the way we think. Everyone who has ever loved someone and held that life dear should read this stunning book, and shiver." --Chris Cleave, author of Little Bee and Incendiary "Extraordinary, compulsive and brilliant." --David Peace, author of the Red Riding quartet and the Tokyo trilogy "An utterly compelling read." --Mo Hayder, author of Ritual and Tokyo "Parry has a knack of tacitly cross-examining his readers . . . not implicating them exactly, but immersing them in a darkness that thickens as facts come to light . . . [He] skilfully manipulates the narrative to keep the reader in a state of awful uncertainty about what will happen next." --Geoff Dyer, The Observer (London) "Compelling . . . Rich in intelligence and insight . . . This isnt just the tale of a murder case but a book that sheds light on Japan, on families, on the media, and . . . on the insidious effects of misogyny." --Blake Morrison, The Guardian "A work not only of page-turning intensity but also of touching sensitivity and deep insight." --David Pilling, Financial Times "A classic of the rather compromised true crime genre, a rigorous, meticulous and intelligent work of long form journalism . . . Lloyd Parry deals with the consequences for families, friends and lovers--unassuageable pain, guilt and recrimination--with most unusual thoroughness and scrupulous empathy." --Peter Alford, Weekend Australian "Thoroughly researched [and] very well written, appalling and absolutely enthralling." --Patrick Skene Catling, The Irish Times "The most compelling book I read this year . . . Written with a novelists eye for insight and narrative, its a cracking read that tracks the haphazard investigation, the eventual arrest of the truly bizarre killer and the heartbreaking plight of the Blackman family members left to cope with the dreadful consequences." --Sydney Morning Herald Review Quote Thoroughly researched [and] very well written, appalling and absolutely enthralling. Excerpt from Book 1. THE WORLD THE RIGHT WAY ROUND Even later, when she found it difficult to see any good in her husband, Lucies mother, Jane, always acknowledged that Tim Blackman had saved their daughters life. Lucie had been twenty-one months old at the time, cared for by her father and mother in the cottage they rented in a small village in Sussex. Since infancy, she had been stricken with fierce bouts of tonsillitis, which drove up her temperature and swelled her throat. Her parents sponged her with water to cool her down, but the fevers lingered, and when one had passed another would seize hold within a few weeks. One day, Tim had come home early from work to help Jane care for the needy child. That night, he was awakened by a cry from his wife, who had gone in to look at her. By the time he entered the nursery, Jane was already running downstairs. "Lucie was motionless at the bottom of the cot, and she was clammy," Tim said. "I picked her out and put her on the floor, and she was turning gray in front of me, just the most sickly, blacky-gray color. Quite clearly the lifeblood wasnt being pumped round her body. I didnt know what to do. I was cuddling her on the floor, and Jane had run down to phone an ambulance. Lucie was completely quiet, wasnt breathing. I tried to force open her mouth. It was tightly shut, but I forced it open with two hands and held it open with the thumb of one hand and put my fingers in and pulled her tongue forward. I didnt know whether I was doing any good or not, but I did it, and then I put her head to one side, and then I breathed into her and then pushed the air out, breathed into her and pushed it out, and she started to breathe on her own again. I was sick with anxiety and worry, and then I saw the pink coming back to her skin, and by that time the ambulance had arrived, and the ambulance blokes were rushing up the tiny, weeny stairs, these great big blokes with all this huge, noisy kit on, big beefy chaps who were as big as the cottage. And they got their stretcher out and strapped her on and carried her downstairs and put her in the back of the ambulance. And after that she was fine." Lucie had experienced a febrile convulsion, a muscle spasm caused by fever and dehydration that had caused her to swallow her own tongue, blocking off her breathing. A few moments longer, and she would have died. "I knew at that moment that I could not only have one child," Tim said. "I knew. Id thought about it before, when Lucie was born. But at that moment, I knew that if anything had happened to her, and we didnt have any other children, it would be an absolutely terrible disaster." * * * Lucie had been born on September 1, 1978. Her name was from the Latin word for "light," and even in adulthood, her mother said, she craved brightness and illumination, and was uncomfortable in the dark, switching on all the bulbs in the house and going to sleep with a lamp turned on in her room. Janes labor had to be induced, and it lasted sixteen hours. Lucies head was positioned against her mothers back, a "posterior presentation" that caused her great pain during the delivery. But the eight-pound baby was healthy, and her parents experienced deep, but complicated, happiness at the birth of their first child. "I was delighted, absolutely delighted," said Jane. "But I think when you become a mother, you … I just wanted my mother to be there, because I was so proud Id had a baby. But she wasnt there, so it was sad as well." Jane remembered little but sadness from her own childhood. Her adult life, too, had been marked by clusters of crushing, overwhelming loss, which had bred in her a dry, dark humor, alternately self-deprecating and indignantly defensive. She was in her late forties when I first met her, a thin, attractive woman with short dark blond hair and sharp, vigilant features. Her outfits were tidy and demure. Long, delicate lashes ringed her eyes, but the girlishness that they might have suggested was dispelled by a fierce sense of rightness and a scathing intolerance of fools and snobs. Pride and self-pity were at war within Jane. She was like a fox, a stubborn, elegant fox in a navy blue skirt and jacket. Her father had been a manager at the Elstree film studios, and she and her younger brother and sister had grown up in the outer London suburbs, a strict and rather drab middle-class life of homework and good table manners and the annual summer holiday in a gusty English seaside resort. When Jane was twelve, the family moved to south London. Before her first morning at her new school, Jane went in to kiss her mother goodbye and found her asleep after a night of headaches and insomnia. "I felt that something awful was going to happen," Jane said. "And I said to my father, Shes not going to die, is she? and he said, Oh no, dont be silly, of course not. And then I came home from school that day, and shed died. Shed had a brain tumor. And from then on my father was distraught. He was broken, a broken man, and I just had to be brave. That was the end of my childhood." Janes mother was forty years old at the time of her death. "My grandmother looked after us during the week, and at weekends it was Daddy," she said. "I remember him just crying all the time." Fifteen months after his wifes death, he married a woman in her mid-twenties. Jane was appalled. "But he had three children, and he just couldnt function. It was terrible. The truth is that I cant remember much of my childhood. When youve had a shock, and been through a time as painful as that, your brain makes you forget." Jane left school at fifteen. She took a secretarial course and found a job at a big advertising agency. When she was nineteen, she traveled to Mallorca with a girlfriend and stayed there for six months, cleaning cars for a living. It was before the age of mass British tourism to Spain, and the Balearic Islands were still a select and exotic destination. The famous Manchester United footballer George Best was a visitor. "I didnt meet him, but I remember seeing him in these bars, surrounded by beauties," said Jane. "But I was very sensible, I was very careful. Ive got the word sensible running through my body like a stick of rock. Everyone else might have been swinging but I wasnt. I was just very boring." In Mallorca, Janes virtue was tested by a young man, a nodding acquaintance, who appeared at her front door one day and attempted to kiss her. "I was absolutely mortified, because I hardly knew him, and it was the middle of the afternoon. He was Swedish, I think. I hadnt given him any provocation, and it made me very wary after that. I liked the sun and the sea, I liked being in the outdoors, but I cant say it was a wild time, because Im sensible. I never slept with anyone until I slept with my husband." * * * She was twenty-two when she met Tim, and living with her father and stepmother in Chislehurst in the London borough of Bromley. He was the older brother of a friend, and Jane had already heard all about him. "People said to me, That Tims a right one," she remembered. "A right one for the women." Tim had just returned from the south of France, where he had been staying with a French girlfriend. "But he started flirting with me anyway, and I gave him one of my icy stares," said Jane. "I think I was the first person in his life who hadnt fallen for him just like that, so I was a challenge. But I had no confidence, if Im honest. I had lots of very beautiful girlfriends who had men flocking round them, but at discos I was always the custodian of the handbags. Tim couldnt understand why I hadnt fallen for him hook, line, and sinker, and I couldnt understand why anyone would fancy me, and I think thats why I ended up marrying him." The wedding was eighteen months later, on Tims twenty-third birthday, July 17, 1976. Tim managed a shoe shop in the nearby town of Orpington, a relic of the dwindling chain of businesses that his father had once owned across the southeast. But the shop failed, and Tim found himself claiming the dole for six months. He ended up supporting his young family with odd jobs for friends and as a freelance painter and decorator. "We were living hand to mouth," he said. "They were very tricky, very tricky times in the early 1980s, and we didnt know where the next fifty pounds was coming from. But we were in this lovely place with our baby, this Laura Ashleystyle cottage, and it was a very beautiful life. I loved that time when Lucie was little." In May 1980, less than two years after the first baby, Jane gave birth to Sophie, and, three years after that, to Rupert. Tim found a business partner and moved from decorating into property development; in 1982 the family moved a few miles north to the genteel commuter town of Sevenoaks, in Kent. Here, their period of hardship at an end, Jane was able to create for her own family the childhood she had always wanted for herself, an idyll of flowers and pretty dresses and the laughter of little children. The house where they lived, which Jane christened Daisy Cottage, overlooked a private prep school-Granville School, or the Granville Schoo Details ISBN0374230595 Author Richard Lloyd Parry Short Title PEOPLE WHO EAT DARKNESS Language English ISBN-10 0374230595 ISBN-13 9780374230593 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY B Year 2012 Publication Date 2012-05-22 Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2012-05-22 NZ Release Date 2012-05-22 US Release Date 2012-05-22 UK Release Date 2012-05-22 Pages 464 Publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc Imprint Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc Subtitle The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo--And the Evil That Swallowed Her Up Illustrations Halftones, black and white Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! 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