People Who Eat Darkness (38 page)

When he had left the apartment the next morning, he continued, Lucie had been fine. “I know that Lucie died,” he said. “But I did not take any action which led to her death. Though I might have some responsibility for the incident, I didn’t do anything listed in the criminal indictment.”

A dozen reporters bustled out of the courtroom to file news of the plea for their television stations and wire services. Obara sat down again, and the chief prosecutor rose to read aloud the detailed indictment. He spoke in a breathless monotone, flipping over each page as he ended it, at a speed that was difficult for the reporters to follow. “By 1983 at the latest, using various names and without revealing his [real] identity,” the indictment read, “the accused began taking women to Zushi Marina, giving them drugged drinks, causing them to lose consciousness, raping them while wearing a mask, and videoing it. He committed this crime quite regularly. He called it ‘conquest play.’”

*   *   *

One thing stands out above all in considering the differences between the courts of Japan and those of Western Europe and North America: the conviction rate. Courts in the United States typically convict 73 percent of the criminal defendants who come before them, about the same as Britain. In Japan, the figure is 99.85 percent. Trial, in other words, brings almost guaranteed conviction: walk into a Japanese court, and you have the slimmest chance of leaving through the front door. And this is reflected in the way that the public, the media, and even lawyers regard defendants. In Japan, for all practical purposes, you are not innocent until proven guilty. “You’re guilty from the moment of arrest,” one of Obara’s lawyers would tell me. “Look at the amount of space given to reports of criminal cases. In a newspaper, the arrest of the suspect is huge. When charges are brought, that’s smaller. Conviction and sentencing is a minor story.”

Even the Japanese language colludes in this assumption. From the moment of arrest, sometimes before charges have been laid, a suspect ceases to be referred to by the conventional honorifics, -
san
or -
shi
, and becomes -
yogisha
. Obara-yogisha: not Mister, but Criminal Suspect Obara.

Prosecutors insist that the conviction rate is high because they send to trial only cases in which the suspect’s guilt is clear and certain. Guilt or innocence, in other words, is established during the investigation, behind closed doors, not publicly in the courtroom. “Prosecutors, like just about everyone in Japan, believe that only the guilty should be charged and that the charged are almost certainly guilty,” writes the sociologist David Johnson. “The vast majority of Japan’s criminal trials do not resemble fights, battles, or sporting events, as the adversarial logic of its laws seems to prescribe, but rather ‘ceremonies’ or ‘empty shells,’ devoid of even minor disagreements.”

The converse of this is that acquittals, on the very few occasions they occur, are a humiliating blow for the authorities. In Western courts, defense lawyers win cases; in Japan, prosecutors lose them, and the loss can be devastating. When Joji Obara was led into court, bound and shackled, the odds were stacked overwhelmingly against him. But there was an enormous amount at stake for the other side too. The document being gabbled out in the courtroom that morning was the culmination of a year of joint effort by the detectives and prosecutors. Careers and reputations rested on it.

*   *   *

After setting out the facts of Carita’s case—her swift and unstoppable decline, her chloroform-saturated liver, the masked man in the video—the indictment moved to Lucie and to Obara’s movements during her last day of life.

At midnight on June 30, he had bought grapes, grapefruit, melon, and mandarin oranges from an all-night shop in the Akasaka district of Tokyo. Forty minutes later, he filled up his Mercedes-Benz at a nearby petrol station. At half past one the following afternoon, he phoned Lucie and postponed the time of their meeting. He went to the dry cleaner in the New Otani Hotel to drop off some laundry, then called Lucie again and picked her up in front of Sendagaya Station at three thirty. As they drove down to Zushi, at just after five o’clock, Lucie borrowed his phone to call Louise Phillips from the car. Obara took his photographs of her at five twenty judging from the quality of sun and shadow. By six o’clock, they had gone into apartment 4314 of Zushi Marina. Lucie, who had eaten little all day, must have been hungry by this point; Obara called a local restaurant and ordered fried chicken and deep-fried tempura of shrimp and eel. A notice had been delivered to the apartment reporting a fault with the gas supply, so he phoned Tokyo Gas and at seven fourteen a repairman appeared to carry out the routine job. It was while Obara was dealing with him that Lucie called Louise from the new phone that Obara had just given her. Then she left a message for Scott; and there she disappeared.

“Between that time and 2 July 2000, in the same apartment,” the indictment explained, “the accused gave her a drink containing sleeping drugs and used chloroform to make her lose consciousness. He raped her, and around that time he caused her death through the effects of the aforementioned drugs, either through cardiac arrest or failure of respiration.”

The prosecutors’ narrative picked up again on Sunday afternoon, when Obara, traveling by train and taxi, visited one of his apartments in Tokyo, returning to Zushi Marina that evening. Early the following morning, he went back to Tokyo, where he activated another one of his large collection of prepaid mobile telephones. Just before half past five in the afternoon, he used it to call Louise Phillips.

“My name is Akira Takagi,” he said. “Anyway, I’m ringing on behalf of Lucie Blackman.”

Over the next two and a half hours, he made a series of further calls, to an electrical shop, a hardware shop, and L. L. Bean. The following afternoon, Tuesday, he visited them in turn and purchased tents, mats, a sleeping bag, flashlights, a hammer, cutters, a handsaw, a chain saw, a shovel, vessels and tools for mixing and stirring, three 35-pound sacks of cement, and a chemical agent to speed its setting.

On Wednesday, July 5, he drove to the apartment at Blue Sea Aburatsubo, in a Mercedes stuffed with objects covered by white sheets. The following day the caretaker became suspicious and called the police, who glimpsed the sweating Obara amid a mess of cement and bags, before he apologized to them, bearing the frozen body of his dog.

In the early hours of the following morning, the caretaker’s boyfriend saw someone who looked like Obara walking near the beach with a shovel.

“Between 5 and 6 July 2000,” the prosecutor droned, “with the use of an electric chain saw, either within Kanagawa prefecture or places nearby, or within apartment 401 of Blue Sea Aburatsubo, he cut off the head and arms and legs of Lucie. He put Lucie’s head in cement and dried out the cement, and put it and the rest of the body into rubbish bags, and buried them in a cave under a cliff, and abandoned them.”

On Sunday the ninth, Obara called a Japanese woman whom he had encountered on a telephone dating service. She had never met him in person and didn’t know his real name. It was only by connecting the web of telephones and telephone calls that the police had tracked her down. But she remembered being told by Obara, “I’ve done something terrible, and I can’t tell anyone about it.”

Between late July and early October, he sent four letters to the police, two of them in English, signed in the name of Lucie, listing her debts and enclosing money to pay them off. The police found the same list, along with drafts of the letters, in one of Obara’s apartments.

In the cave where Lucie’s body had been buried was a bag for a tent identical to the kind that Obara had purchased from L. L. Bean. The chain saw was never found, but the marks on Lucie’s bones were consistent with the model he had bought on that same day. They found Lucie’s notebook on Obara’s property; they found chloroform and Rohypnol and GHB, and other powerful sleeping drugs.

The indictment was based upon evidence amassed over months by Superintendent Udo’s men: telephone records, toll receipts, highway CCTV cameras, the testimony of the delivery boy, caretaker, and fruit vendor. Everything was documented; the twenty-eight files on the case filled three shelves in the corner of the courtroom. But between Saturday, July 1, and Sunday, July 2, and between the fifth and the seventh, there was a vacuum, a void in the narrative that the telephone calls, witnesses, and transactions failed to fill. A confession would have filled them; so would a sample of Obara’s DNA—blood, hair, or semen—on Lucie’s body. But—either because too much time had passed, or they had never been there—the forensic examiners never found a trace. Lucie had died, somehow. Someone, somewhere had cut her up with a chain saw and buried her in a cave. The circumstantial evidence posed the insistent question: If it hadn’t been Joji Obara, who else could it have been? But literal, unimaginative, unforgiving Japanese justice demanded to know: How
exactly
did it happen?

*   *   *

The trial hearings were held in courtrooms of various sizes, but all of them were strip-lit, windowless inner chambers filled with dead, thermostatically regulated air. Japan passed from sweaty summer to cold, arid winter, but in court, the temperature never varied: neither cool nor warm, neither dry nor humid. The rooms were rectangular, with the public seats marked off by a wooden barrier. On the other side, the defense lawyers and prosecutors faced one another at parallel desks; between them was the upright podium for witnesses and the accused. A court clerk and a grimacing stenographer sat at the back facing the public; behind and above them were the three judges in high-backed chairs that reared over them like black halos.

The somnolence of the hearings, particularly after lunch, was often overwhelming. One of the judges, a plump, rather young man who sat on the chief judge’s right, spent much of the trial with his eyes closed: whether he was concentrating profoundly, or simply asleep, it was difficult to tell. Obara’s own lawyers had to poke awake one of their own number when he began snoring audibly one afternoon. In a British court, such an incident would be a cause for shame and reprimand. But here, the clerks snickered, the judges smiled indulgently, and it was immediately forgotten.

Japan had abandoned jury trials during the Second World War. Since then, exclusive power to determine guilt or innocence, and to impose sentence, lay with a panel of three judges.
*
Unlike Britain, where they are appointed from the ranks of senior barristers, Japanese judges form a dedicated legal class of their own. A young man, fresh from law school (and almost all are men), enters the judiciary and might do nothing else throughout his career. To Western eyes, junior judges, with their soft, plump faces and pimples, looked incongruously young. Their authority was emphasized by long black robes; the occupants of the courtroom rose to their feet as they entered the chamber. Witnesses took a solemn oath before their testimony; lawyers and judges addressed one another politely and formally. But there was none of the dignified theatricality that one encounters in a British court, and little sense of the court as a place apart from the world around it.

Cross-examinations were pedestrian and anticlimactic. Statements were read gabblingly; legal motions were dry and unimpassioned. No one ever lost his temper or raised his voice, or displayed any personal care about the outcome of the proceedings. There was no oratory, no grandstanding, no conflict, no drama, and little display of emotion beyond occasional mild irritation. Rather than a majestic legal inquiry, the trial had about it the air of a teachers’ staff meeting at a stuffy school.

Month after month, the voices of the lawyers droned, and the stenographer’s fingers trembled over her keys. From time to time, I nodded off myself. But beneath the shroud of bureaucratic beige was a dreamlike suspense. It was as if a mosquito was buzzing somewhere, on the very threshold of human hearing; it was like the heightened reality before the breaking of a fever, or the chord of sensation—part sound, part vibration—that comes off an electrical pylon. It seemed to originate in Joji Obara himself.

*   *   *

Obara was transported to the monthly hearings from the Tokyo Detention Center, a twelve-story fortress in the suburb of Kosuge. His lawyers must have registered an objection, because after the first few hearings, he was never again seen shackled and bound by the heavy blue rope. He sat on the right-hand side of the court, with his defense team behind him and his two guards on either side.

He had the dignified, put-upon air of a man in regrettably reduced circumstances, who was struggling nonetheless to keep up appearances. In court, he always wore an open-necked shirt and a suit of navy blue or charcoal gray, smart and expensive-looking but wrinkled as though too recently removed from storage and inadequately sponged. His hair was soft, cut to medium length, and similarly unkempt, as if brushed and patted in a hurry: over eight years I watched grayness creep inwards from his temples, as thinness spread more slowly outwards from the crown. He wore spectacles with dark frames and always held a small blue towel with which he mopped the sweat from his face, his hands, and his neck. The court was a public space where it was unnecessary to remove outer footwear, and everyone else kept on their shoes. Only Obara had on his feet a pair of flappy plastic slippers, a further precaution, I assumed, intended to impede any attempt at escape.

The handful of snapshots of Obara were at least thirty years old, so for the Japanese media it was a matter of urgency to get an up-to-date picture out of the trial. Photography of any kind was banned in court, but professional artists, frowning and intent with their sketch pads and pastels, pushed their way busily to the seats in the front row.

But Obara foiled them, as he had foiled every other attempt to capture his image. From the moment he entered the courtroom, he turned his face at a three-quarter angle away from the public gallery and towards the judge. The drawings in the newspapers the next morning showed the last, and least interesting, quarter: hair, a neck, the collar of a jacket, and the rear left-hand side of Obara’s jaw. Even under the scrutiny of the court, it was impossible to look at him full in the face.