People Who Eat Darkness (24 page)

They sat down to drink beer and eat the fugu, which Yuji had brought with him. Then he produced an electric guitar and plugged it into an amplifier. A recorded backing track started up and he began playing and singing along. The song was “Samba Pa Ti” by Carlos Santana, of whom Yuji was an enthusiastic devotee. He even had a photograph of himself with the singer in the United States. “I quite liked Santana, but playing along to him on a karaoke track—well, I thought that was pretty naff too,” Christa said. “By now, it had started to get light outside, and I was thinking that this had all gone on long enough.” She told Yuji that she wanted to go back to Tokyo, but he said he had one more thing to show her. He described it as a rare wine from the Philippines; it was among the clutter of bottles on the sideboard. He poured a measure of it into a small glass from a crystal decanter and handed it to Christa, who downed it in a single draught as she stood by the window.

For other women in the same situation, that was the last thing they knew: the acrid, chemical taste of the “wine” going down. But months of hard drinking had made Christa tolerant of the most powerful intoxicants. “I had no expectation at all of anything being wrong,” she said. “And I think he’d cottoned on that I liked to drink a lot and that I was the sort of person who always took on a challenge. I drank it because that was the kind of thing I did then—I was into being tough. I can remember standing at the window as it came on, realizing what had happened and that this could be a very big problem. I had time to reflect on what was happening. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, fuck.’ It was like going under a general anesthetic. I was already too drugged to feel afraid.”

*   *   *

She woke up in the darkness lying alone in a bed. She understood immediately what had happened and the kind of thing that must have taken place while she was unconscious. “I remember thinking, ‘How do I feel?’ and trying to work out what exactly had happened to me. But I didn’t feel sore. And I had my clothes on. I thought that I must have been asleep a long time, because he’d bothered to dress me.”

They had driven to the apartment in the early hours of Saturday morning. It was now Saturday evening—Christa had been unconscious for more than twelve hours. Yuji was there, behaving almost as though nothing had happened. It was as if he was waiting for her to say something, to hurl an accusation—but Christa was silent. “I just wanted to get home. I remember thinking, ‘If he doesn’t take me back, how will I get to Tokyo?’ because I had no idea where I was. But he did drive me back.” Christa felt hungover in the car, but she often did in those days. Otherwise she was calm.

She said, “It seems pretty strange to me now, the way I behaved. But the thing with hostessing is that it’s like a game, for the girls and the guys. The girls are trying to get money, with no intention of giving anything back. And the guys are trying to get as far as they can, without giving any more than they would normally pay in the club. When I woke up that day I was angry, but I felt like it was partly my own doing to be in that situation. I think that’s pretty typical from what I’ve heard—that women who’ve been raped feel partly responsible.

“I thought I’d understood the rules, but I hadn’t. I was naïve in that way. So I felt he’d won the game. I was pissed off, but I didn’t really reflect on it that much. I wasn’t really conscious of the dangerousness of the situation. It wasn’t until years later that I realized. Actually, I didn’t want to think about it, because if I’d admitted how dangerous it was I would have had to change the way I lived my life.”

Yuji dropped Christa off at home later that evening. The following week she went back to work at the club. He didn’t come in again.

*   *   *

Christa stayed in Japan, living the life of the hostess. She moved to different clubs in new Japanese cities. She would work for a few months, accumulating cash, and then spend weeks traveling for pleasure, to India, Iceland, Canada.

In 1999 she was living in Sapporo, in the far north of Japan. There she met a foreign girl who had stories of a wealthy man who preyed on hostesses in Tokyo, taking them to a seaside apartment and drugging them. It could only be Yuji Honda. It was the first time that she had consciously thought about the incident in years.

A few months later, Christa was living in Japan’s second city, Osaka, when she got a telephone call from an old friend, a former Tokyo hostess who had moved back to London. The girl’s younger sister was coming out to Japan with a friend—would Christa meet up with them in Tokyo?

The caller was Emma Phillips. The pair bound for Tokyo were Louise Phillips and Lucie Blackman.

Christa booked the room in Sasaki House. It was she who was waiting for them when they arrived, smoking spliffs and having her hair dressed in the oil that so revolted Louise. The three women spent that evening together. Lucie and Louise found Christa intimidatingly self-assured, but she was charmed, and even touched, by them.

“They were so excited and vibrant—two young girls on their first big trip, their first break for independence. I remember thinking that Lucie was like me when I was nineteen, physically, I mean—tall and blond and so on. And Louise and Emma could be identical twins. So it was strange when they walked in the room, like looking five years back in time at me and Emma. And I remember thinking straightaway that Lucie was [Yuji’s] type—if I was his type, then she would be too—and feeling a bit worried for them because they were so green. But they were happy and enthusiastic, and I wanted them to have a good time. I didn’t want to put a downer on it, so I didn’t say anything about him. But I did think of him, which was odd because he wasn’t someone I normally thought about.”

Two months later, she was back in Osaka when Emma called with the news that Lucie had gone missing. “She said that she’d gone out with a customer from work on a drive to the sea, and she hadn’t come home. I was immediately sure, absolutely sure, that it was Yuji.”

She phoned Louise, who was incoherent with distress. Christa said, “I thought that he’d let her go after she’d come round from the drug, like I did. I thought she’d come back.” But after two days, there was still no sign of Lucie. Christa took the bullet train to Tokyo and went directly to Azabu Police Station.

*   *   *

Japan has the cuddliest police in the world. To many Japanese, the mere sight of
omawari-san
(literally, “Honourable Mr. Go Around,” the expression for the cop on the beat) provokes feelings of tender pride more conventionally aroused by children or small, appealing animals. To the foreigner, too, there is something touchingly nostalgic about their neat navy blue uniforms and clunky, old-fashioned bikes. It is hard to believe that the handguns they carry at their hips contain real bullets and impossible to imagine them ever being fired (prudently, they are attached to their uniforms by a cord, like a child’s mittens). And then there is the symbol of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, the country’s proudest and most prestigious force: not a stern mastiff, or a watchful hawk, but a cheerful orange fairy named Peepo. The police are one of the things that impart to Tokyo its quaint, innocent, 1950s flavor: a tribe of earnest Boy Scouts, protecting the city from evildoers.

On the face of it, they are astonishingly and uniquely successful. Japan, like most nations, goes through spasms of anxiety about youthful delinquency and the erosion of traditional morals. But the essential fact remains: by every measure, Japan is the safest and least crime-ridden country on earth. Offenses like muggings, burglary, and drug dealing, which city dwellers in the rest of the world have learned to accept as part of everyday life, are between four and eight times lower than in the West.

Violent crime is rarer still, and for all of this the Japanese police proudly take credit. They believe that because Japan has the world’s lowest crime rate, they must therefore be the world’s greatest crime fighters. For years, this was the view of the Japanese population. One encounters little of the low-level cynicism that the inhabitants of other world cities instinctively feel towards the forces of law and order. But in 2000, at the time that Christa Mackenzie went to Azabu Police Station, this loyal consensus was unraveling.

After a series of scandals, the Japanese police were facing their most vociferous criticism in decades. Across the country, police officers had been exposed for sexual harassment, bribery, blackmail, drug taking, assault, and simple professional incompetence.
*
The
Yomiuri Shimbun
, one of the most conservative and pro-establishment of the country’s newspapers, called the situation “a disgrace, the likes of which have not been witnessed in a long time.” An editorial in the same newspaper said that “to straighten out this organisation, which has completely lost discipline, the only solution is complete, drastic reform.” An opinion poll showed that 60 percent of Japanese did not trust the police, compared to 26 percent in the previous survey two years earlier. It was in this atmosphere of defensiveness and anxiety that the investigation into Lucie’s disappearance began.

*   *   *

By their own account, the police had moved with unusual speed. “I want you to understand how quickly we liaised among ourselves,” said Chief Superintendent Fusanori Matsumoto, the head of Azabu Police Station and the man who supervised the first days of the Lucie Blackman investigation. “We were motivated by our instincts as veterans. And then there was the fact that this girl was British, and the fact that she had been a cabin attendant for a famous company such as British Airways, a job that many girls aspire to.”
*

The converse of this, although the superintendent would never have spelled it out, was that if the missing woman had been, for example, a Chinese or a Bangladeshi whose previous career had been in a fish-canning factory or a massage parlor, his interest in the case would have been drastically reduced. “At first they didn’t take it all that seriously,” one person close to the investigation told me. “It was just another girl who had gone missing in Roppongi. In Tokyo, girls go missing quite often—Filipinas, Thais, Chinese. It’s impossible to investigate them all.” What marked this case out from others was not merely the nationality of the victim, or the identity of her former employer, but the intense external pressure that quickly came to bear on the police.

First it was just Sophie Blackman visiting the police station, demanding answers. But soon she was accompanied by Alan Sutton, the formidable British consul general, whose staff were on the phone every day. Then Tim Blackman arrived, and soon—and unbelievably—he was talking to Tony Blair. The detectives, and many of the Japanese reporters, were astounded by this last development. The equivalent situation—a Japanese prime minister intervening in the search for a mislaid mizu sh
ō
bai girl—was unthinkable. (“That Mr. Blackman,” Chief Superintendent Matsumoto asked me at one point in our interview, as if it were the only possible explanation, “was he a
friend
of Prime Minister Blair?”)

And then Tony Blair was taking the problem to the Japanese prime minister, who had no choice but to express his own concern and determination—and all of this under the noses of dozens of reporters. “We had an understanding with the Japanese media, we knew how to handle them,” said Chief Superintendent Matsumoto. “But we had no idea how to deal with the foreign media. It was very annoying.”

Matsumoto telephoned Jane Blackman in Sevenoaks and heard from her what everyone who knew Lucie would repeat: it was inconceivable that she would have gone off on her own without explanation. On July 11, a special investigation headquarters was established in Azabu Police Station to look into the case, headed by one of the most experienced detectives in Tokyo, Toshiaki Udo. Superintendent Udo was second in command of Tokyo’s First Criminal Investigation Division, and his men were the elite of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. They handled the greatest and most sensational crimes in the country: murders, rapes, kidnappings, armed robberies. For fame and glamour, they were the equivalent of Scotland Yard’s Flying Squad, the fictionalized heroes of film, television, and novels. Superintendent Udo had worked on Japan’s biggest postwar criminal investigation—into the apocalyptic religious cult Aum Shinrikyo, which released sarin nerve gas on the Tokyo subway during the morning rush hour in 1995. He was a rather tall, oval-faced man, with wide and intense eyes that gave him an expression of constant mild surprise. He had about him the air of a kindly deputy headmaster rather than a tough detective, and it was difficult to imagine him expressing extremes of any kind of emotion. But the search for Lucie literally shook him. “I worked on many big cases, on many famous cases,” he told me. “But when the responsibility of solving the Lucie case was given to me, my body trembled physically with the tension. I sensed, by instinct, that it would turn out to be a serious crime. I could smell it. I knew that we couldn’t ignore it.”

His immediate subordinate was Akira Mitsuzane, who would deal face-to-face with the Blackman family. It had taken over a week for the police system to wake up, clear its throat, and decide that there was work for it to do—and by its own standards, that was good going.

*   *   *

What did the detectives do for the next few weeks? It is difficult to reconstruct the sequence of events fully, but nothing happened fast. By the time Udo’s special investigation headquarters had been established, Matsumoto’s officers had already confirmed the basic facts of Louise’s story: the status of the two girls in Japan, their residence at Sasaki House and employment at Casablanca. This took three days. But from the moment that Louise reported Lucie’s disappearance on July 3, it was more than six weeks before they made any concrete progress at all.

Early checks were run on religious cults in Chiba prefecture. (“There are so many, though,” said one detective. “We need more information.”) But other exceedingly obvious leads remained unpursued. Almost two weeks after Lucie’s disappearance, the police had still not spoken to Lucie’s boyfriend, Scott Fraser, nor had they made any efforts to interview anyone called Akira Takagi, the name by which the mysterious caller had identified himself. “It could be a fictitious name,” a spokesman said. “We do not want people of the same name to be unnecessarily troubled.”