People Who Eat Darkness
Love, Grief and a Journey into Japan’s Shadows
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4.2 • 12 Ratings
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
*** Richard Lloyd Parry is the Winner of the 2018 Rathbones Folio Prize ***
In the summer of 2000, Jane Steare received the phone call every mother dreads. Her daughter Lucie Blackman - tall, blonde, and twenty-one years old - had stepped into the vastness of a Tokyo summer and disappeared forever. That winter, her dismembered remains were found buried in a desolate seaside cave.
Her disappearance was mystifying. Had Lucie been abducted by a religious cult? Who was the mysterious man she had gone to meet? What did her work, as a 'hostess' in the notorious Roppongi district of Tokyo, really involve? And could Lucie's fate be linked to the disappearance of another girl some ten years earlier?
Over the course of a decade, Richard Lloyd Parry has travelled to four continents to interview those caught up in the story and been given unprecedented access to Lucie's bitterly divided family to reveal the astonishing truth about Lucie and her fate.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
London Times Asia editor and Tokyo bureau chief Parry (In the Time of Madness) spent nearly a decade in pursuit of the truth behind the disappearance and murder of a young British woman in Tokyo. He offers an exceptional and terrifying account of sexual sadism, the Japanese legal system, and a family ripped apart by tragedy. Twenty-one-year-old Lucie Blackman traveled to Tokyo with her best friend in 2000 to pay off her debts by "hostessing," which, unlike prostitution, simply involved chatting up male visitors for as long as possible. But one night, Lucie disappeared. For seven months, her father, Tim, and younger sister Sophie traveled to Tokyo repeatedly, begging for help from the public and the inept police, who seemed to be investigating at a glacial pace. Eventually, Lucie's dismembered remains were found buried in a seaside cave near the home of the only suspect. Reporting the story, Parry discovered a side of Japan he hadn't known; his Tokyo thrums with energy, and the long-dead Lucie haunts the page as her killer fills the reader's consciousness with an undeniable sense of dread.
