People Who Eat Darkness Read online

  FOR MUM AND DAD

  Among the old men who secretly came to this “house of the sleeping beauties,” there must be some who not only looked wistfully back to the vanished past but sought to forget the evil they had done through their lives … among them must be some who had made their successes by wrongdoing and kept their gains by repeated wrongdoing. They would not be men at peace with themselves. They would be among the defeated, rather—victims of terror. In their hearts as they lay against the flesh of naked young girls put to sleep would be more than fear of approaching death and regret for their lost youth. There might also be remorse, and the turmoil so common in the families of the successful. They would have no Buddha before whom to kneel. The naked girl would know nothing, would not open her eyes, if one of the old men were to hold her tight in his arms, shed cold tears, even sob and wail. The old man need feel no shame, no damage to his pride. The regrets and sadness could flow quite freely. And might not the “sleeping beauty” herself be a Buddha of sorts? And she was flesh and blood. Her young skin and scent might be forgiveness for the sad old men.

  —YASUNARI KAWABATA, House of the Sleeping Beauties

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  PROLOGUE: LIFE BEFORE DEATH

  PART I: LUCIE

  1. THE WORLD THE RIGHT WAY ROUND

  2. RULES

  3. LONG HAUL

  PART II: TOKYO

  4. HIGH TOUCH TOWN

  5. GEISHA GIRL! (JOKE)

  6. TOKYO IS THE EXTREME LAND

  PART III: THE SEARCH

  7. SOMETHING TERRIBLE HAS HAPPENED

  8. UNINTELLIGIBLE SPEECH

  9. THE FLICKERING LIGHT

  10. S & M

  11. THE MAN-SHAPED HOLE

  12. DIGNITY OF THE POLICE

  13. THE PALM TREES BY THE SEA

  PART IV: OBARA

  14. THE WEAK AND THE STRONG

  15. GEORGE O’HARA

  16. CONQUEST PLAY

  17. CARITA

  18. IN THE CAVE

  PART V: JUSTICE

  19. CEREMONIES

  20. THE WHATEVERER

  21. SMYK

  22. CONDOLENCE

  23. THE VERDICT

  PART VI: LIFE AFTER DEATH

  24. HOW JAPANESE

  25. WHAT I REALLY AM

  NOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ALSO BY RICHARD LLOYD PARRY

  PRAISE FOR PEOPLE WHO EAT DARKNESS

  COPYRIGHT

  PROLOGUE: LIFE BEFORE DEATH

  Lucie wakes up late, as usual. A line of daylight flares at the edge of the shrouded window and pierces the dim interior. A low, cramped, colorless space. There are posters and postcards on the walls, and blouses and dresses on overburdened hangers. On the floor, two human shapes on two futon mattresses: one head of blond hair, one of brown. They sleep in T-shirts, or naked beneath a single sheet, for even at night it is too hot and clammy for anything but the thinnest layer against the skin. Outside, crows are cawing and scuffling on the telegraph wires that tangle between the buildings. It was four in the morning when they went to sleep, and the plastic alarm clock shows that it is almost noon. The brown head remains huddled on its pillow as Lucie puts on her dressing gown and goes to the bathroom.

  She refers to her home in Tokyo as the “shithouse”—the bathroom is one of the reasons why. Half a dozen people share it, plus their overnight guests, and the room is vile with their parings and detritus. Exhausted tubes of toothpaste curl on the edges of the sink, sodden lumps of soap drool on the floor of the shower, and the plughole wears a slimy cap of clotted hair, skin, and toenail clippings. Lucie’s own vanity products, which are numerous and expensive, are brought into and removed from the bathroom on every visit, along with her combs, brushes, and makeup. Her toilet is lengthy and fastidious, a practiced drill of shampooing, rinsing, conditioning, soaping, toweling, patting, smoothing, cleansing, moisturizing, absorbing, tweezering, brushing, flossing, and blow-drying. Lucie epitomizes the distinction between simply taking a shower in the morning and grooming. If you were running late, you wouldn’t want to find yourself behind her in the queue for the bathroom.

  What does Lucie see when she looks into the mirror? A full, fair face, surrounded by naturally blond hair falling below the shoulder. A solid chin; strong, even, white teeth; cheeks that lift and dimple when she smiles. A rounded nose; sharp, closely plucked brows and small dark blue eyes that angle away from the horizontal. Lucie deplores her “slanty eyes” and spends long mirror hours wishing them away. They are subtly and unexpectedly exotic on a woman otherwise so fair complexioned, so blue eyed and long limbed.

  Lucie is tall—five nine—with a good bust and hips. She pays anxious attention to the surges of her fluctuating weight. In May, after the effort of traveling to Japan, moving into the shithouse, and finding work, she was slimmer than this, but after a few weeks of late nights in the club, she has “drunk it back on again.” On her worst days, she is filled with contempt for her own appearance. She feels bloated and saggy; she is tortured by self-consciousness about the birthmark on her thigh and the dark mole between her brows. A dispassionate observer might describe her with old-fashioned and faintly equivocal words such as “buxom” and “comely.” The brown-haired girl on the other mattress, Lucie’s best friend, Louise Phillips, is far more of a conventional beauty: slim, small, pert featured. But for most of the time, to other people at least, Lucie communicates a confidence and an ease. Her way of laughing, of moving her hands as she speaks, of shaking her hair, her habit of unselfconsciously touching the person she is talking to—all of this lends her a charm that appeals to women as well as to men.

  Lucie emerges from the bathroom. What does she do next? I know that she doesn’t write in her diary, which has been neglected for almost two weeks. She doesn’t call Scott, her boyfriend, who serves on the American aircraft carrier in the port city of Yokosuka. Later, among her personal possessions, her family will find an unsent postcard, addressed to her great friend from home, Samantha Burman. Perhaps she writes that card now.

  Darling Sammy, just a little note from Tokyo to say how good it was to talk to you the other evening. I’m so glad you’ve found a lovely friend/guy/mate (whatever he is). I know it’s easier for me over here as my everyday life has changed and Sundays are so different at the moment, but I wanted to let you know that life is incomplete without you and although I’m not sure when, we will be together soon, be it wherever I am, or me back home. I do love you and miss you terribly and always will. All my love, Lulu

  At half past one the telephone rings downstairs. One of the other flatmates answers and calls from below: it is for Lucie. Unlike Louise, who has her own cell phone, given to her by one of her customers, Lucie has had to rely on the shit-house’s shared pay telephone. It is a clunky pink plastic box in the kitchen, fed by ¥10 coins; conversations on it can be overheard by anyone else who is downstairs. But Lucie will not have to put up with this unsatisfactory situation for much longer. In just a few hours, she will have a mobile of her own.

  Louise is up by now and sits in the common living room during her friend’s brief conversation. It was him, Lucie tells her after hanging up the pink receiver: the meeting has been postponed by an hour until three o’clock; he will call again and she will meet him at the railway station. Then they will have a late lunch, but she will be back in good time for the agreed eight o’clock rendezvous—a night of dancing with Louise and one of the other girls from the club. Lucie takes off her dressing gown and chooses her outfit for the day: her black dress, the silver necklace with the heart-shaped crystal pendant, and the Armani watch. Her sunglasses are in her
black handbag. Three o’clock comes and goes. At three twenty the pink phone rings again for Lucie; he is on his way and will be at the station in ten minutes.

  The crows flap and complain as Lucie steps outside. As she does, she experiences the small daily shock of reentry that every foreigner in Tokyo knows. A sudden, pulse-quickening awareness of the obvious: Here I am, in Japan. Every morning it takes her by surprise—the sudden consciousness of profound difference. Is it something unfamiliar about the angle of the light, or the way that sounds register in the summer air? Or is it the demeanor of the people on the street and in the cars and the trains—unobtrusive but purposeful; neat, courteous, and self-contained but intent, as if following secret orders?

  Even after years and decades have passed, you never get over the excitement, the unique daily thrill, of living as a foreigner in Japan.

  The shithouse—or Sasaki House, to give it its formal name—is a grimy plaster-covered building at the dead end of an alleyway. Lucie turns left out of it and walks past more exhausted-looking apartment buildings, a children’s playground with wooden climbing frames, and an old-fashioned restaurant serving rice omelets and curry. Then comes a jewel in the midst of the drabness—a classical Noh theater, in smooth modernistic concrete, surrounded by sculpted hedges and a gravel garden.

  Lucie turns right, and the neighborhood undergoes a sudden transformation. The atmosphere up to here has been shabby and suburban; now, less than five minutes from home, Lucie is walking along a main road in a big city. Railways and an expressway run above it on elevated piles. Five hundred yards further on is Sendagaya Station, where bus routes intersect with subway and commuter lines. It is a busy place on a Saturday afternoon, noisy with traffic and with people in short sleeves and summer dresses bustling in and out of the station and the Olympic Gymnasium on its far side. He’s waiting there for Lucie, in front of the police station; his car is nearby.

  * * *

  Shortly before Lucie, Louise leaves the house on her own mission: to exchange a pair of shoes in Shibuya, the great shopping district of southwest Tokyo. She takes the train to Shibuya Station, where nine different lines deposit two and a half million passengers every day, and where Louise quickly becomes lost. She wanders confusedly among the Saturday crowds, along streets of shops and restaurants which, despite their dizzying diversity, somehow manage to be indistinguishable from one another. After much time wasting, she finds the shop she is looking for, then walks wearily back to the station.

  Just after five o’clock, her mobile rings. The screen displays the words USER UNSENT. But the voice is that of Lucie, who should be heading home soon to prepare for the night ahead. Instead she is calling from inside a moving car. She’s on the way to the “seaside,” she says, where she will have lunch with him (although it is getting very late to talk of lunch). But there is no need to change their plans for the evening, she tells Louise; she will be home in good time, and she will call again in an hour or two to say exactly when. She sounds happy and cheerful, but self-conscious in the manner of someone whose conversation can be overheard. She is calling from his mobile, she tells Louise, so she cannot chat long.

  Later, Louise would say that she was surprised by this development and that it was out of character for Lucie to get into a man’s car and drive out of Tokyo with him. But it was very like her to make this call. Lucie and Louise have known one another since they were girls, and this is the kind of friendship they have. They phone one another just for the sake of it, to reaffirm closeness and trust, even when there is little to say.

  It’s an oppressively hot and humid summer afternoon. Louise visits her and Lucie’s favorite shop, the department store Laforet, and buys shiny stickers and glitter to decorate their faces for their night of dancing. The sun sinks in the sky; the evening begins, spreading a cloak over the dim residential shabbiness and illuminating in neon the restaurants, bars, and clubs, all the places of promise and delight.

  Two hours pass.

  At six minutes past seven, when Louise is back at home, her cell phone rings again. It’s Lucie, full of high spirits and excitement. He is very nice, she says. As promised, he has given her a new mobile phone—and a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne, which she and Louise can drink together later. It’s not clear exactly where she is, and Louise doesn’t think to ask. But she will be back within an hour.

  At seventeen minutes past seven, Lucie calls the mobile phone of her boyfriend, Scott Fraser, but connects only to voice mail. She records a short but happy message, promising a meeting tomorrow.

  There Lucie vanishes.

  It’s the beginning of a Saturday evening in Tokyo, but there will be no girls’ night out and no date with Scott. In fact, there will be nothing else at all. Stored in the digital data bank of the telephone company, where it will be automatically erased in a few days’ time, the mobile phone message is Lucie’s last living trace.

  * * *

  When Lucie failed to return as promised, Louise’s alarm was immediate and overwhelming. Later, people would point to this as a reason for suspicion: Why would Louise have got into such a panic, so soon? Her flatmates, who were sitting in the living room smoking marijuana, couldn’t understand her agitation. Little more than an hour after Lucie’s expected return, Louise was already telephoning her mother, Maureen Phillips, in Britain. “Something has happened to Lucie,” she told her. Then she went to Casablanca, the hostess club in the entertainment district of Roppongi where the two of them worked.

  “I remember that first day very clearly, the first of July,” said a man who was there at the time. “It was a Saturday night, and it was Lucie and Louise’s day off that week. Neither of them was supposed to work. But quite early on, Louise came in and said, ‘Lucie’s missing. She went to meet a customer. She’s not come back.’ Well, it’s not so surprising. It’s still only eight, nine o’clock. I said, ‘It’s normal, nothing really strange, Louise. Why are you so worried?’ She said, ‘Lucie’s the kind of person who will come back, or if something happens she’ll call me.’ And it was true for them. What one was doing, the other one always knew about. They had a really strong relationship. Louise knew that something was wrong, right away.”

  Louise kept calling the club all night, asking if anyone had news of Lucie, but there was no news. She walked around Roppongi, visiting every one of the bars and clubs where she and Lucie used to go: Propaganda, Deep Blue, the Tokyo Sports Cafe, Geronimo’s. She talked to the men who handed out flyers on Roppongi Crossing, asking if any of them had seen Lucie. Then she took a taxi to Shibuya and went to Fura, the club where the two of them had been planning to go that night. She knew that she wouldn’t find her friend there—why would Lucie have gone on ahead alone, without coming home first, or at least calling her? But she couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  It rained for much of the night—warm, perspiration-inducing Tokyo summer rain. It was light by the time Louise returned to Sasaki House early on Sunday morning, having been into every bar that she could think of. Lucie was not at home, and there was no message from her.

  Louise telephoned Caz, a Japanese man who worked at Casablanca as a waiter, and debated what to do. Caz called a few of the bigger hospitals, but none of them had heard of Lucie. Wasn’t it at least possible, he suggested, that Lucie had decided to spend the night with her “nice” customer and simply failed to let Louise know? Louise said that it was unthinkable, and no one was closer to Lucie than Louise.

  The obvious next step was to contact the police. But this prospect brought its own load of anxiety. Lucie and Louise had entered Japan as tourists, on ninety-day visas that explicitly forbade them from working. All the girls in the clubs, in fact most of the foreigners working in Roppongi, were in the same situation. They, and the clubs that employed them, were breaking the law.

  * * *

  On Monday morning, Caz took Louise to Azabu Police Station in Roppongi and filed a missing-person report. They explained that Lucie was a tourist on holiday in Tokyo
who had gone out for the day with a Japanese man she’d met. They made no mention of hostessing or Casablanca or its customers.

  The police showed little interest.

  At three o’clock in the afternoon, Louise went to the British embassy in Tokyo. She spoke to the vice-consul, a Scot named Iain Ferguson, and told him the full story. Ferguson was the first of many people to express bafflement at the circumstances in which Lucie had gone out on that afternoon. “I asked what was known of the client and was taken aback to hear nothing,” he wrote in a memo the next day. “According to Louise, girls within the club routinely, and with the club’s consent, hand out their business cards and clients as a result often make private appointments with the girls. I stated I found that hard to believe, that the club would allow the girls to meet with clients without their knowledge. Louise however remained firm. Certainly Lucie had said nothing of her client, his name, anything of his car or even where they had gone other than the beach…”

  Ferguson pressed Louise on Lucie’s character. Was she capricious, unpredictable, unreliable? Was she naïve or easily influenced? “All of Louise’s responses drew a consistent picture,” he wrote, “of a confident, worldly-wise, intelligent individual who had the experience and judgment not to have foolishly put herself in danger.” Why, then, had she got into a car with a complete stranger? “Louise could … not explain, restating that such behavior was out of character for Lucie.”

  No one has more experience than a consular officer of the folly of the British abroad. And no one understands better that, most of the time, when a young person “disappears” there is a predictably mundane explanation: a tiff between friends or lovers; drugs, or drunkenness, or sex. But Lucie had telephoned twice during the afternoon to update Louise on her whereabouts. Having called to say that she would be back within an hour, it was hard to imagine that she would not have done so again, even if her plans had changed. Iain Ferguson called Azabu Police Station and told them that the embassy was deeply concerned about Lucie and that they regarded it not as a simple missing-person case but as a probable abduction.