Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on February 2011

For years after her disappearance in the summer of 2000, Lucie Blackman still haunted the streets of Roppongi. The 21-year-old had arrived in Tokyo on a tourist visa, accompanied by a close friend, both of them hoping to pay off the debts they’d accumulated in England by working at a hostess club. On July 1, 2000, Lucie accompanied a customer on a dohan—a compensated date—and was never heard from again.

The police were initially slow to pursue the matter, but pressure from the Blackman family—notably media-savvy father Tim—boosted the profile of the case, to the point that then-Prime Minister Tony Blair was pressuring his Japanese counterpart for a resolution. The police arrested their chief suspect in October, but it would take them until February 2001 to finally find Lucie, her body dismembered and head encased in concrete, buried in a cave on the Miura Coast.

If the nature of her demise was disturbing, so too was the man accused of killing her. Joji Obara was the son of a wealthy zainichi family from Osaka who for decades had apparently been preying on both foreign and Japanese women, luring them to an apartment before drugging and raping them. These encounters were photographed and videoed for posterity, and he kept a detailed written log of his self-described “conquest play.”

Obara would eventually be brought to trial on multiple charges: not only for Lucie’s abduction and death, but also a number of other rapes, including one resulting in the death of an Australian hostess, Carita Ridgway, back in 1992. He refused to confess to these crimes and showed no apparent remorse, even concocting an elaborate claim that Lucie had died in the throes of a prolonged drug binge.

Yet the court’s verdict in April 2007 still took most people by surprise: guilty on all counts, except those relating to Lucie Blackman. More surprising still was a High Court ruling that came 18 months later, which upheld the previous convictions while also overturning the acquittals on most other charges, including the abduction, attempted rape and dismemberment of Lucie’s body—just not her actual killing.

These are the grim facts at the heart of Richard Lloyd Parry’s People Who Eat Darkness, a compelling and level-headed account that tries to understand a case so awful that it seems almost impossible to fathom. Lloyd Parry, a veteran journalist and the Asia Editor for the London Times, avoids jumping to obvious conclusions: he rejects the claim that Obara was a psychopath, and is even more dismissive of the notion that his crimes were an extreme manifestation of a deeper malaise in Japanese society.

The book is based on extensive interviews conducted not only with Lucie’s family and close friends, but also key figures involved with the case, including some of the senior investigators. While the police were widely criticized, Lloyd Parry presents a more nuanced picture, praising the dedication of individual figures and directing blame instead at the institutional failings of a system that is “sclerotic, unimaginative, prejudiced and procedure-bound, a liability to a modern nation.”

Despite the author’s attempts, Obara himself remains a mystery: a man who has gone through life without ever making any friends, and erased his past so effectively that the media were forced to rely on three-decade-old photos of him when reporting the trial. Yet perhaps the most surprising moment in the book comes when Tim Blackman admits to feeling sympathy for the man accused of killing his daughter, a “degree of… pathos that tends to neutralize what might be more natural anger.” It’s in mapping these gray areas that People Who Eat Darkness really transcends the confines of the “true crime” genre, and emerges as a work of far greater significance.