People Who Eat Darkness Read Free Page B

of the capital.
    “MISSING,” ran the bilingual text along the top and, at the bottom, “Lucie BLACKMAN (British Female).”
Age:
21 years
Height:
175cm Medium Build
Hair Color:
Blonde
Eye Color:
Blue
She was last seen in Tokyo on Saturday July 1st. Since then she has been missing.
If anyone has seen her, or has any information relating to her, contact Azabu Police Station or your nearest police station.
 
    The poster was dominated by the photograph of a girl in a short black dress sitting on a sofa. She had blond hair and white teeth exposed in a nervous smile. The camera looked down on her from above, making her face appear broad and childlike. With her large head, long hair, and firm chin, the girl in the poster looked like no one more than Alice in Wonderland.
    *   *   *
    Lucie Blackman was already dead. She died before I ever knew that such a person existed. In fact, it was only because she was dead—or missing, which was as much as anyone knew at the time—that I took an interest in her at all. I was the correspondent for a British newspaper, living in Tokyo. Lucie Blackman was a young British woman who had disappeared there—which is to say that, in the terms in which I first thought of her, she was a story .
    At first the story was a puzzle, which developed over time into a profound mystery. Lucie emerged as a tragic victim, and finally as a cause, the subject of vigorous, bitter contestation in a Japanese court. The story attracted much attention in Japan and Britain, but it was fickle and inconsistent. For months at a time there would be no interest in Lucie’s case, then some fresh development would bring a sudden demand for news and explanation. In its outlines the story was familiar enough—girl missing, body found, man charged—but, on inspection, it became so complicated and confusing, so fraught with bizarre turns and irrational developments that conventional reporting of it was almost inevitably unsatisfactory, provoking more unanswered questions than it could ever quell.
    This quality of evasiveness, the sense in which it outstripped familiar categories of news, made the story fascinating. It was like an itch that no four columns of newspaper copy or three-minute television item could ever scratch. The story infected my dreams; even after months had passed, I found it impossible to forget Lucie Blackman. I followed the story from the beginning and through its successive stages, trying to craft something consistent and intelligible out of its kinks and knots and roughness. It took me ten years.
    I had lived in Tokyo for most of my adult life and traveled across Asia and beyond. As a reporter of natural disasters and wars, I had seen something of grief and darkness. But Lucie’s story brought me into contact with aspects of human experience that I had never glimpsed before. It was like the key to a trapdoor in a familiar room, a trapdoor concealing secrets—frightening, violent, monstrous existences to which I had been oblivious. This new knowledge made me feel obscurely embarrassed and naïve. It was as if I, the experienced reporter, had been missing something extraordinary in a city that it was my professional pride to know intimately.
    It was only when she was slipping from public consciousness that I began to consider Lucie as a person rather than a story. I had met her family over the course of their visits to Japan. As a reporter of the case, I had been treated first with cautious mistrust and eventually with cautious friendship. Now I traveled back to Britain and visited the Blackman family on their home ground. I tracked down friends and acquaintances from the different stages of Lucie’s life. One led to another; those who were at first reluctant to speak were eventually persuaded. To Lucie’s parents, sister, and brother, I returned repeatedly over a period of years. The accumulated recordings of these interviews add up to several days.
    I thought that grasping the essentials of