UBC: Parry, People Who Eat Darkness

[truepenny]

People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo - and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up by Richard Lloyd Parry

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

[library]

This book is amazing.

I chose it because I get audiobooks from the library, and my selection of true crime is fairly limited. I didn't know anything about Lucie Blackman or her terrible murder, so my expectations were a null state. Even if I had known, I don't think I would have expected a book this excellent. Parry, the London Times Tokyo bureau chief is a vivid, clear, exact writer. He tells his story beautifully, and he does something that very little true crime is ever able to do: he describes so that it can be felt the sheer destruction of murder. Not just Lucie's life, but the lives of her parents, siblings, friends. Not just her murderer's empty life, but the lives of his parents and brothers, the lives of his other victims (Joji Obara is only known to have killed one other young woman, Carita Ridgway, but I can't help feeling there may have been more, if for no other reason than that chloroform is a dreadfully chancy drug), the girls he drugged insensible and made movies of himself raping. Parry follows the snaking paths of destruction out farther and farther: Lucie's ex-boyfriend, Carita's long-time lover, and the horrible chasms where Lucie and Carita ought to be.

I'm honestly not sure I've ever read a work of true crime that captured the devastation murder wreaks on the lives of the survivors as vividly and as thoughtfully as Parry does. Partly that's because, although he never met her and never heard of her until she was already dead, over the course of the decade that he spent covering the Blackman story and talking to everyone who would talk to him, reading Lucie's old diaries and school compositions (and oh my god the hair on the back of my neck stood on end when Parry quoted Lucie's diary, from her first day in Tokyo, supposing that in three months' time she would look back and laugh at her own naivete; at that moment, Lucie, painfully naive, had a little less than two months left to live), in an odd way, Parry himself became one of Lucie's survivors. His grief is there, too, impersonal, mostly submerged. Partly it's because he is compassionate but completely ruthless in his depiction of Lucie's family, her terrible narcissistic mother, her strange father, both charismatic and repellent, her sister, so both like and unlike Lucie herself, who very nearly died of Lucie's death, the brother who never got to know Lucie as anything but his older sister. And because Parry doesn't pull any punches, doesn't smooth over contradictions and bitter disagreements, these people's pain is as present in the book as any human character.

This is also an excellent book because of Parry's relationship with Tokyo, the relationship of a gaijin who, as Parry says, has lived in Tokyo most of his adult life and both knows and doesn't know it. It's like the kaleidoscope of Murakami's Underground, twisted one-quarter counterclockwise and looked through again (and with a weird, chilling coincidence in that the story Lucie's killer told to buy himself time was that she had joined a cult). The salarymen who are so many of the victims in Murakami are the background static of Roppongi, where Lucie Blackman was living and working (illegally, on a tourist visa) when she crossed paths with a man who ate darkness.

Ultimately, if there's a thing that feels like the bedrock of the book, it's that if, as Lucie feared, she was "ordinary" (by which she meant "boring and unimportant"), her life and her brutal death show just how valuable "ordinary" people can be, how not boring and not unimportant, just as, conversely, it shows that some "extraordinary" people--and Joji Obara is certainly that, regardless of what other adjectives one might choose--are only important because they are destructive. Obara is literally not 1/100th as valuable a human being as Lucie Blackman was. And one of the many things about this very sad book that makes it so painfully sad is that Lucie herself never got the chance to understand that.




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