People Who Eat Darkness
Ratings22
Average rating3.5
*** 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.
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Fascinating and heartbreaking. (Though content warnings: for sexual assault, particularly by use of GHB/Rohypnol; murder/abduction - the descriptions aren't graphic overall but it's a big part of the story, unfortunately, so be advised.) The author is a longtime foreign correspondent for the British press, and seems to do a good job telling the story without turning it into “look at those strange foreigners” gawking or exploitation.
A true crime story of a British girl who disappeared in Japan. At once the story of an average girl, a police procedural, a divorced famil and an alien culture. Too long at almost 450 pages.
I liked this book! I feel like I learned a lot about Japan including the complicated racial tensions between Japanese and Korean folks, the historical context for the police and their behavior in Japan, and his teasing in general. I liked it but didn't LOVE it - def didn't feel like I wasted my time but also didn't find myself wanting to run back to this book to figure out what comes next. Not for the faint of heart!
