When Richard Lloyd Parry began his research several years after the death of Lucie Blackman in Tokyo in 2000, he anticipated his book would be about the crime, the hunt for the killer and the subsequent court case. But he quickly realised it would be just as much about Blackman, her family and how they had been traumatised by the murder.
The story that so caught the imagination of the British tabloid press that summer - of a missing 21-year-old Briton who worked as a hostess in a bar in Tokyo's sleazy Roppongi district - took on a life of its own in the years that followed, with Lloyd Parry himself becoming a part of the narrative, which has now culminated in the release of his book, People Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman.
Joji Obara, the bankrupt property developer who was eventually found guilty of abducting, drugging, attempting to rape and killing Blackman, as well as eight other rapes and the rape and killing of another hostess, sued Lloyd Parry for libel.
The journalist was also the focus of protests by extreme right-wing groups, apparently at the behest of some shadowy nationalist who had taken offence at his reporting of the imperial family, although there was no way that could be linked to Obara. Most worryingly, a letter that accidentally came into his possession encouraged the extremists it was meant to reach to seibai Lloyd Parry. Seibai is the term used in period dramas on television for how a samurai deals with his enemy, usually with a sword.
The package also included photos of Lloyd Parry that had been taken surreptitiously and the police warned him to be careful, and not to stand too close to the edge of the platform when waiting for a train. 'The next few weeks were like a hallucination,' he says. 'One of the things I love about Japan is that because it is so different you notice things, but after 10 years you tend to stop doing that. But when you're on the lookout for an assassin you get all that freshness back. I found myself remembering licence plate numbers, people wearing dark glasses - it was... quite eerie.'
The libel suits, which were dismissed, were a costly inconvenience to Lloyd Parry and The Times, his employer, but were nothing to what Obara put the families of Lucie Blackman and earlier victim Carita Ridgway through, as well as the handful of women who could be located to testify against him and the hundreds of other women who were seen naked and apparently comatose on video tapes found in his apartments.
