People Who Eat Darkness (47 page)

24. HOW JAPANESE

“When the police were done, I flew back home to England and I was in a trance,” said Louise Phillips. “I didn’t sleep. I cried all the time. I thought that there were people coming to get me. I drank my way through it. I took a lot of drugs. I hated myself; I just didn’t care about anything. I was staying at home, at my mum’s house in Kent, and I was terrible to live with. It was terrible for my family too. I suppose that I didn’t want to be alive. I had nightmares too, about being chased by someone, or trying to save Lucie from a house, and the house was burning down. Or about Lucie coming back, and saying, ‘Here I am, I’ve been looking for you.’ And about that phone call—the phone ringing and a voice saying, ‘You’ll never see her again.’”

The experience of bereavement is often compared to the loss of a limb, but rarely is it a neatly sutured surgical amputation. In the case of a young person who dies violently and unexpectedly, it is like the tearing of an arm from its socket. Muscles and arteries are ripped open; the shock and loss of blood threaten the functioning of organs far from the wound. After Lucie died, the private world through which she had moved was tipped permanently off its axis. The pain of the event surged outwards, afflicting not only her immediate family and close friends but people she had never known.

Sophie narrowly failed to kill herself and spent nine months in psychiatric care. During his first term at university, Rupert Blackman became severely depressed. He came home and lived with Jane and spent much of his time alone in his room, weeping. Lucie’s friend Gayle Blackman spent a year in counseling, and Jamie Gascoigne, the ex-boyfriend of Lucie who had gone out with Sophie to look for her in Tokyo, went through months of anger management. “After I found out what had happened, I just wanted to kill someone,” he said. “I was a really horrible person. After a few months I started seeing a girl I worked with. I was an arsehole. I was brought up to treat women with one hundred percent respect, but the way I treated her was disgusting.”

But the most stricken of all was Louise, who spent years in the clutch of suicidal thoughts. Booze and cocaine did less and less to keep them at bay. The ordeal was made all the harder by the promise, solemnly extracted by the police, that she say nothing about the case to the Blackman family. As a result, Lucie’s closest friends, and Jane Blackman herself, shunned Louise, convinced that she was concealing some crucial article of evidence. She lived at home; apart from intermittent stints as a waitress, she never worked. Eventually, she fell in love and married a man she had first known as a teenager in Bromley, but always the dark shape of Lucie’s death loomed on the edge of her vision, ready at any moment to roll in and black out her happiness. “Nobody was talking to me,” Louise said. “Everybody blamed me. The guilt was crushing. I felt guilty at Christmas, guilty on my birthday. I felt guilty on my wedding day—so guilty that I was getting married, and she wasn’t. I felt guilty for being happy, guilty for getting older. It seemed like it was my fault that I was here and she wasn’t.”

Lucie had gone away, and it had been understood that she would be invisible for a while. But, invisibly, she died; for the seven months that her limbs lay in the cave, she was nowhere. It would have been easier to assimilate if she had been struck down in public, in full view of family and friends. None of them was surprised when she was found to have been killed. Privately, although they would never have owned up to it, all had admitted to themselves that she was never coming back.

But when she was found, it was in a state that might have been calculated to inflict the greatest sense of violation on those who knew her. “I remember thinking about it while Lucie was missing,” said Sophie. “I thought, ‘She’s probably not going to come back now—she’s gone, and I can begin to accept that, but please don’t let her have been chopped up.’” As the photographs that had been thrust before me confirmed, there could be no question of saying goodbye to Lucie’s remains in person. Even her hair—Lucie’s great pride, reflective of the light, the emblem of her loveliness—had been hacked or burned off. And then there was the baffling, protracted trial: grim and comic, lurid and tedious at the same time, with dead pigs in tents, frozen dogs, politely obliging gangsters, and the dark, evasive villain at the center of it.

A crew-cutted thug, a svelte psychopath, or a twitching inadequate—any of them would have been more satisfactory than Joji Obara, with his lisp and his loneliness and his fastidious, outlandish determination. Finally there was the verdict, which pronounced him guilty of everything except harming Lucie, and not because the judge thought he hadn’t done it but because of the inadequacy of the evidence. And now the appeals, by prosecution as well as defense, with a further appeal available after that, and the possibility of all ten verdicts, convictions as well as acquittals, being reversed. There was nothing that could be taken for granted in this case; none of the comforting clichés applied, about just deserts and patience rewarded. Everything seemed designed to deny its victims the consolation of a familiar storyline.

The stresses generated by the case were centrifugal: they forced people apart rather than bringing them together. This was true not only within the Blackman family; many of those who knew Lucie well found themselves becoming alienated from friends, family, and one another. To those who cared about her, almost any reaction to Lucie’s death was unsatisfactory. People were either coldly indifferent or intrusively curious. Everyone had a confidently held opinion, based on superficial exposure to newspaper and television reports, and often implying a judgment about the shadiness of Lucie’s hostessing work and her stupidity in climbing into a stranger’s car. Equally enraging were those acquaintances who exaggerated their closeness to Lucie, because of the glamour of association with such a celebrated victim and the status bestowed by an affected grief.

Even true friends found it difficult to broach the subject with one another. Jane described how her circles of acquaintances shrank, as people she had formerly known well confronted an uncommon challenge of social etiquette: What do you say to the woman whose daughter has recently been chopped up and buried in a cave?

Lucie’s friend Caroline Lawrence came back to Sevenoaks for the Christmas after her disappearance and avoided all her old friends. “I didn’t want to see, hear, think about it,” she said. “I didn’t go out at all. Once, I saw Sophie passing in the street and I hid. So selfish, but I couldn’t bring myself to talk to her.” It wasn’t only the struggle to find appropriate words for Sophie. Her jolting physical resemblance to her sister, which became more pronounced as the years went by, gave more than one person the sensation of standing in the presence of the dead.

Sophie detected this, and her anger at the arbitrariness of such treatment (was she to be punished for resembling her sister?) increased her loneliness. She felt like a ghost for so much of the time anyway; she didn’t need to see it in the eyes of others. Two years after Lucie’s death, Sophie became conscious of having crossed an appalling threshold. It dawned on her that in the passing of time she had become older than her own older sister. It was impossible to explain to anyone how strange and desolating that felt.

*   *   *

Obara’s libel case against me was dismissed by the Tokyo District Court in September 2007. He made an appeal to the High Court, and that too was thrown out eight months later. Perhaps he never expected to win; the point may not have been to prove himself right but simply to harry and intimidate me with a burden of time, paperwork, and expense. Japanese courts, in defamation actions, do not award costs against an unsuccessful plaintiff, and the legal bill for defending the action was £60,000, or about $90,000.
The Times
covered this without a flicker of hesitation or hint of reproach. A threshold had been crossed now, although this became obvious to me only later. For years, I had regarded the story from the detached and privileged distance of a reporter; now it had stepped up and tapped me on the shoulder. Japanese friends, in particular, wondered aloud if I should not ease off on my reporting of the case. But it was impossible to contemplate going back now.

I was not the only object of Obara’s complaints. He sued, and won damages from, several Japanese weekly magazines, and from
Time
magazine, which in 2002 had made the mistake of reporting that he had associations with the yakuza. How could a bankrupt afford these expensive actions, on top of his retinue of criminal lawyers, private detectives, webmasters, and publishers, and the large disbursements of “condolence money”? The answer was his family. Control of Obara’s assets had been passed to relatives, including his mother, Kimiko, now in her eighties; it was them, or their agents, who settled his lavish legal bills. I had heard that Kimiko was alive and still lived in the house where Obara had grown up. The youngest of her sons, Kosho Hoshiyama, also lived in Osaka, where he worked as a dentist and avoided journalists. Then there was the third brother, the aspirant writer, who called himself Eisho Kin. None of the family had ever attended the trial or given an on-the-record interview. Apart from submitting their bills, even Obara’s lawyers had only fleeting and infrequent contact with them. From Tokyo I took the bullet train to Osaka in search of the Kim-Kin-Hoshiyama family.

The cab I caught from the station was owned by Kokusai Takushii—International Taxis, the firm, still owned by Kimiko, on which the family fortune had been built. I went to the plot of land where Obara had planned to build his bubble tower and found it occupied by an empty multistory car park. I found the home where the family had first lived, a shabby house on an alley off a cheap shopping street. It too was deserted; around the corner, one of the family pachinko parlors was shuttered and dark. From there I went to the rich residential district of Kitabatake, where houses were still built in the traditional style, with high walls of clay-covered brick and heavy front gateways roofed in tiles. In front of one of these was a plate bearing the name of Obara’s mother. I pressed the button on the intercom, and after a long wait, the voice of an elderly lady answered.

“Is that Mrs. Kim?”

“She’s not here,” the voice said faintly.

“You’re not Mrs. Kim?”

“I’m the housekeeper.”

“When will Mrs. Kim be back?”

“I don’t know.”

I was fairly sure that this was Mrs. Kim.

As I walked away, a man came out of the next-door gate. He was about fifty years old, wore a crumpled white shirt untucked over black trousers, and carried two plastic bags stuffed with rubbish or dirty laundry. He walked at frantic speed, his head tilted forward. I knew that this must be Eisho Kin.

“Mr. Kin!” I called out as I trotted to catch him up. “Mr. Kin, may I speak to you?” He paused and turned as I introduced myself, and with the introduction he became immediately enraged. I was used to situations where my presence as a reporter was not welcomed, but Eisho Kin was one of the angriest people I had ever met. There were no preliminaries to his outburst, no buildup of irritation. As soon as I had handed him my business card and identified myself, he simply exploded with fury.

“I am a publisher!” he snarled, apropos of nothing in particular. “You should read my books!”

“Well, Mr. Kin, I read your story, about the Korean man and the deaf boys,” I said. “I was interested by it. Could I talk to you sometime?”

“I haven’t seen my brother for thirty years,” he said. “If you ever come back here, I will take certain measures. I don’t want you to come any closer to me.” Mr. Kin stopped, and I stopped too. But he kept talking, placing his bags on the pavement and jabbing his finger at me with rolling eyes.

“If these girls come to a foreign country and follow a guy, a guy who isn’t good-looking, to his apartment—what do you really think about that? Why would she do that?”

“Well, I don’t know, Mr. Kin. If you mean Lucie Blackman, she thought that Mr. Obara was going to give her a present.”

“You are
stupid
!” he said, and he was pacing ahead again with his bags, looking back over his shoulder at me as I tried to keep up. “It’s absurd. You must have bigger issues to pick up than this minor thing.
What about global warming?
”

“Well, I write about various issues—”

“How many times have you seen in Thailand a beautiful girl with some ugly guy?”

“Quite often, I sup—”

“It’s a waste of time.”

“I’m sorry if—”

“Are you doing this for money?”

“It’s my job, if that’s what you mean. I—”

“My father was in prison for two and a half years,” he said in English. He had stopped walking again and put down his bags. “He was resistance, fighting the Japanese. But the only thing I can blame him is, he has no time to take care of the family. But he always said the importance of education.”

I nodded in a way that I hoped would communicate empathy and understanding.

“I don’t go abroad, but I speak Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and English.”

I kept nodding.

“I’m not rich,” he said. “The Japanese media say that my brother is the property tycoon of eastern Japan. Such stupid…” He waved his hand in disgust.

“Don’t come here again,” he said. “Never come back. Never come close to me. If you come back, I’ll take certain measures.”

“Mr. Kin, I don’t wish to bother you, I just have a few…”

He was stamping away down the street with his rubbish or laundry, still muttering and shaking his head as he went.

*   *   *

In March 2007, a month before the verdict in the Tokyo District Court, a twenty-two-year-old British woman named Lindsay Hawker was murdered in Tokyo’s eastern suburbs. She was a teacher of English. One Sunday, she went to the apartment of a twenty-eight-year-old man named Tatsuya Ichihashi after giving him a conversation lesson and never returned home. When the police called there the following day, Ichihashi fled from them in his stockinged feet. The officers found Lindsay buried in a soil-filled bathtub. She had been beaten, raped, and throttled.