People Who Eat Darkness (23 page)

The mounting hostility towards Tim seemed to begin when Jane started visiting Japan, and this was not a coincidence. Among the volunteers in Tokyo, Tim said little about his ex-wife, but to people she trusted, Jane talked freely about the failure of her marriage, or her view of it. Huw, Adam, and Dai all came away with an uncomplicated picture of a wronged wife and a philandering husband, who had neglected his family after walking out on them. Goodwill ebbed away from Tim and towards Jane. It was as if there was a limited quantity of it available to the Blackmans, and it had to be divided between them.

Perhaps sensing this shift, Tim gave an interview to a British Sunday tabloid, which did nothing to improve his standing among the people looking for Lucie. He talked of his pain at Lucie’s disappearance and compared it to the experience of becoming estranged from her after the collapse of his marriage. “Jane is devastated and I can understand that,” he told the
Sunday People.
“But I find it difficult to feel an ounce of sympathy for her. It’s the same as when I couldn’t see Lucie before. Obviously, this is worse, but Jane’s going through now what she helped put me through previously. So I am emotionally cold towards Jane’s suffering.”

Since their brief and unhappy conversation over the telephone, Jane and Tim had not spoken; and they carefully timed their visits to Tokyo to avoid ever meeting. After Jane and Dai Davies left Japan at the beginning of October, Tim stayed at home in the Isle of Wight. Sophie had gone home too; Adam Whittington had left at the end of August. The answering machine attached to the Lucie Hotline was checked and logged by the staff of the British consulate.

• Caller saw a girl who looked like Lucie on 2 Oct at around 1 p.m. near an optician near Kinshicho. She was walking down the street with a man. He added that there are lots of indecent clubs/bars where Asian and European girls are working.

• Caller said that he had information about a religious organization. Asked that a Japanese-speaking British person call him back.

• Background music only.

But for the first time since Lucie had disappeared three months earlier, none of her family was in Tokyo looking for her.

*   *   *

I lived in Tokyo throughout the Lucie Blackman time. I followed the case intently and wrote about it for my newspaper. I tried to answer the obvious questions put to me by my editors, questions that a British reader might ask, a person without particular knowledge of Japan. Some of them were settled quickly enough—about Lucie’s life in Tokyo and the peculiar role of the foreign hostess. But to the biggest question of all—
What happened to her?
—there was no answer. And, lacking one, people began to pose other questions, such as,
Was she on drugs?
and
What did the best friend know?
and
What about the father?

As a reporter, I moved across Japan’s public surface. By day, I encountered bureaucrats, politicians, academics, professionals; in my own time, I relaxed with people like me, who loved Japan and thought that they understood it well enough, even if they would never call it home. Roppongi was a place for occasional rowdy nights out; male friends of a certain temperament would go to the titty bars for their stag nights. Now, as a reporter in search of Lucie Blackman, I found myself visiting them myself and paying a tariffed sum of money for conversations with attractive, and knowing, young women. At first the clubs were alert and hostile to journalists—more than once, there were scuffles between bouncers and suspiciously nosy “customers” with notebooks and cameras. But the water trade quickly found its level again. Even Casablanca, which had shut its doors within a few days of Lucie’s disappearance, reopened at the end of August under a new name: Greengrass.

I spent long nights there, or in One Eyed Jack’s, or in the Tokyo Sports Cafe, alone, or with a friend, pressing drinks on hostesses who knew less about Lucie Blackman than I did but who had all heard rumors: about cults, or rape gangs, or S & M circles. Roppongi, formerly so crude and neon bright, came to seem dark and damp and mysterious; creatures lurked beneath its stones. I would arrive home at 4:00 a.m., drunk and with clothes steeped in cigarette smoke, my pockets stuffed with napkins bearing scrawled notes. And in sleep, I dreamed one of the oldest male dreams of all: of being the knight who rides to the dark tower, slays the dragon, frees the missing damsel, and basks forever in the glory.

At Azabu Police Station, I submitted to repeated fobbings off. At the British embassy, I was patiently told the obvious. I formed alliances with Japanese reporters, who would pass on what little they had picked up from the police in return for my gleanings from the Blackman family. I even mounted a photograph of Lucie on a piece of cardboard and kept it in my bag to show to people as I went about life in Tokyo. Everyone recognized the girl in the picture, but nobody had seen her.

Even when there was nothing new to report, it was impossible to forget the case. People don’t dissolve into particles.
Something
had happened. So much information had been assembled—about Lucie, about Roppongi, about hostesses, and about the events of that Saturday afternoon. But at the core, there was a hollow, a gaping space. People hated the void and wanted it to be filled. They wanted Tim to fill it, with pain and anger, all the obvious and easily comprehensible emotions, and when he refused to supply them, they resented him for it.

Nobody knew what fitted into the hole. And yet everyone knew. It was a hole in the shape of a person, the person who had taken Lucie and done harm to her. Everyone knew this, deep down, and they knew that the person had to be a man.

I hated the duty—which every reporter must face from time to time—of speaking to the bereaved and scared, to the victims of loss. I was always afraid of getting the tone, the register, wrong, of appearing too cold and brisk, or bogusly concerned and sympathetic. I had to steel myself to call the Blackmans—Jane with her grief, Sophie with her defensiveness and aggression, and Tim with his intolerable helpfulness and charm. But by October, they had all gone sadly home, and it started to become possible to pass days without thinking about Lucie. And then one evening a Japanese reporter friend phoned and said that the Tokyo police were about to make an arrest, and that this seemed at last to be the man who fitted into the man-shaped hole.

12. DIGNITY OF THE POLICE

Christabel Mackenzie had come to Tokyo to escape, although not from any of the conventional hardships of the runaway. Her father was a well-known Scottish lawyer, and her mother was an academic at Edinburgh University. Christa was clever and pretty and grew up in cultured affluence; a life of upper-middle-class respectability was hers for the taking. But wealthy Edinburgh was smug and airless; Christa wanted independence and excitement. She dropped out of school and worked as a receptionist, dropped back in to sixth-form college and took a couple of A levels, then moved to London and a job in a department store.

London never felt far enough from home. A woman she knew had lived in Japan and told Christa about the excitements and opportunities there. She had landed in Tokyo in January 1995, alone, at the age of nineteen. She would live there for most of the next seven years.

Christa had quickly discovered one of the defining features of life as a foreigner in Japan and the reason it attracts so many misfits of different kinds: personal alienation, that inescapable sense of being different from everyone else, is canceled out by the larger, universal alienation of being a gaijin. “I really loved Japan,” Christa told me. “I still do, although it’s a love/hate thing too. There are some things I find appalling and some things that I love. But there was a lot of freedom, because no matter what you do there, you’re a freak, aren’t you? People are going to stare at you anyway, so you can stop worrying about it and let your hair down. And you’re making good money, so you can
really
let your hair down. You’re so far away, you feel that anything you do is going to be insulated from your real life.”

Christa was tall, blond, and wild. She briefly took a job as an English teacher, but the work bored her; within a few weeks she was a hostess in a small club called Fraîche. It was in Akasaka, the district adjoining, and upmarket of, Roppongi, a resort of Japanese salarymen rather than young gaijin. A handful of authentic geisha still worked in Akasaka in traditional teahouses patronized by Japanese politicians and the executives of the country’s biggest companies. But such people rarely walked into Fraîche. Most of Christa’s customers were lonely, charmless men, for whom a couple of hours spent talking in English to a pretty young foreign girl was an exotic, and otherwise unobtainable, pleasure.

“There was a small bar, a karaoke machine, six to eight girls,” she said. “It was a tame place. Sometimes there were customers who were aggressive or mean or had bad breath, but only a few of them were really unpleasant. Most of them were fine—the biggest drag was the boredom. The d
ō
hans were stress-free—just dinner somewhere in Akasaka, and then back to the club.” The most successful hostesses adopted a persona of naïve innocence; customers often seemed reassured by the sensation of conversing with someone less intelligent than them. Christa could never bring herself to play dumb and developed other means of filling the time: silly drinking games (and she liked to drink), flirtatious conversational gambits, and drugs.

The mid-1990s represented the last wheezing gasp of Japan’s bubble economy, but there was still a lot of loose money in Tokyo and startling rewards for hostesses with the right tactics: stories circulated about girls who had been given Rolexes, gold bars, even apartments by infatuated customers. Akasaka’s greater respectability compared to Roppongi was reflected in the money paid to its hostesses. Having earned $180 a week in London, Christa was now being paid ¥3,000 (close to $30) an hour, and that was before bonuses for requests and d
ō
han.

One night a man whom she hadn’t seen before came into the club. From the depth of the manager’s bows and the obsequiousness of his welcome, she knew that he must be an established and high-spending customer. He introduced himself as Yuji Honda, and it was immediately obvious that he was a cut above the average patron of Club Fraîche.

He was a short man in his early forties, with a manner and bearing quite different from the typical salaryman. His face was unremarkable, but he wore an expensive-looking jacket with an open-necked silk shirt. He spoke good English, and unlike many of the customers, he was never obviously lecherous, or clownish, or pitiable. “He had this strained kind of arrogance and confidence about him that I always found amusing,” Christa said. “Because he wasn’t particularly good-looking or winning in his personality. But I did find him intriguing, not like most of the other customers. He was difficult to figure out. There were oddities about him.

“He had a bit of a swagger, sort of an arrogant way of walking. And there was something odd about the way he talked. It’s difficult to describe—it was almost like a lisp, something funny about the shape of his mouth. It was almost like a baby’s mouth. He used to slip his tongue in and out, like a lizard.” And he sweated—even in the air-conditioned chill of the club, he would frequently produce a small hand towel and mop his face and neck and brow.

Christa and Yuji spent all of that first evening together; he promised her that he would come to see her again. It had all the makings of the perfect d
ō
han relationship.

For a month, they went out for dinner every week. Each evening he pulled up in a different car: a white Rolls-Royce convertible, and three kinds of Porsche. Christa made a point of not being impressed by money, but she recognized that this, by any hostess’s definition, was the dream customer. Once, Yuji took her for a lavish Chinese banquet, complete with dishes of jellyfish and shark-fin soup; another time, they dined on fugu, the famous puffer fish, which can be poisonous unless it is correctly, and expensively, prepared. He didn’t talk much about himself, but the display of money was evidently important to Yuji; someone in the club told Christa that his family was the fifth richest in Japan. “He was really into fugu—he said that he ate it every day,” Christa remembered. “That was just one example of the way he showed off. I always find it funny when people think that because they’ve got money, they are a fabulous person.” This was how Christa regarded Yuji—unusual, mildly ludicrous, and harmless.

One night in May 1995, he picked her up after work and suggested a drive to the seaside. It was three a.m., but Christa was never one to let conventional notions about bedtime get in the way of an adventure, and she was curious to see the holiday home Yuji had described. They drove there in the white Rolls-Royce. Christa was shivering in the powerful air-conditioning, but Yuji was sweating in his thin silk shirt. “It was really noticeable,” she said. “I thought that he must be on coke or speed or something, although he wasn’t. And he was a really bad driver. He always had his foot either hard down on the accelerator or on the brake, never anything in between.” Christa was only vaguely aware of the direction in which they were driving, but after an hour or so, they arrived at a marina where yachts were moored. Next to it were apartment buildings containing holiday flats; tall palm trees shook ragged leaves in the wind off the sea. As Yuji had talked about this place, Christa imagined a beach house along Californian or Australian lines, a villa with its own garden and a private swimming pool. The reality was a disappointment: a large building containing dozens of identical cramped apartments. “As soon as I saw the place, I thought, ‘What am I doing here?’” she said. “I thought, ‘This guy doesn’t really have as much money as he says.’”

The apartment was on the third floor, a small, slightly shabby bachelor pad with a single living room facing onto a thin strip of balcony, a narrow kitchen, and a still smaller partitioned-off area that appeared to be a bedroom. There was nothing glamorous or seductive about the place. The sofa was luridly upholstered in thick fabric bearing a pattern of creeping foliage and cabbage roses. Behind it was a sideboard laden with bottles of different shapes and colors. “His apartment was really naff,” Christa said. “Kitsch, like maybe his mother decorated the place for him. All the furniture seemed kind of seventies—grandmotherly and floral, that kind of feeling.”