People Who Eat Darkness: Love, Grief and a Journey into Japan’s Shadows

Richard Lloyd Parry

Sep 2012 · Random House

About this ebook

*** Richard Lloyd Parry is the Winner of the 2018 Rathbones Folio Prize ***

In the summer of 2000, Jane Steare received the phone call every mother dreads. Her daughter Lucie Blackman - tall, blonde, and twenty-one years old - had stepped into the vastness of a Tokyo summer and disappeared forever. That winter, her dismembered remains were found buried in a desolate seaside cave.

Her disappearance was mystifying. Had Lucie been abducted by a religious cult? Who was the mysterious man she had gone to meet? What did her work, as a 'hostess' in the notorious Roppongi district of Tokyo, really involve? And could Lucie's fate be linked to the disappearance of another girl some ten years earlier?

Over the course of a decade, Richard Lloyd Parry has travelled to four continents to interview those caught up in the story and been given unprecedented access to Lucie's bitterly divided family to reveal the astonishing truth about Lucie and her fate.

Ratings and reviews

A pleasure at the same time a pain to read. The writer speaks to you with such fervour in this pulsating thriller that you get invariably hooked on to the narrative. At the same time, you develop a sort of a bond with Lucie, which makes you pensive and melancholic at the same time. May her soul rest in peace.

Thoroughly researched, well written and compelling account of the death of Lucie Blackman. However I did feel the author was biased and unfair in his portrayal of Jane Blackman.

About the author

Richard Lloyd Parry is Asia Editor of The Times. He was born in 1969 and was educated at Oxford. He has been visiting Asia for eighteen years and since 1995 has lived in Tokyo as a foreign correspondent, first for the Independent and now for The Times. He has reported from twenty-one countries and several wars, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia, East Timor, North Korea, Papua New Guinea, Vietnam, Kosovo and Macedonia. His work has also appeared in the London Review of Books and the New York Times Magazine. He is the author of In The Time of Madness, an eyewitness account of the violence that interrupted in Indonesia in the 1990s, and People Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman.