People Who Eat Darkness (33 page)

The volume of documents taken away from the apartments—from thick notebooks and diaries to yellowing, decade-old receipts—was vast. The police and prosecutors would continue sifting through them, uncovering new and incriminating material. But early on, according to one Japanese newspaper, they came upon a list of about sixty women’s names, Japanese and foreign. Beside each one were the aliases, almost all of them different, that Obara had used over the years: Yuji, Koji, Kazu, Kowa, Honda, Saito, Iwata, Iwasaki, Akira. The list went back years; some of the women were identified by just a single name, but for others there were telephone numbers or addresses.

The detectives also found receipts for several ambitious shopping expeditions that Obara had made in the early days of July. On Sunday the second, the day after Lucie’s disappearance, he had bought twenty pounds of dry ice from a dealer near Blue Sea Aburatsubo, as well as a large packing box; the following day he had returned to the same place and bought twenty pounds more. “Is it for a big dog that’s passed away?” the dealer asked, and Obara agreed that it was.

On Tuesday the fourth, he had gone to the Tokyo branch of L. L. Bean and purchased camping equipment, including three two-man tents, three groundsheets, a folding table, a seven-gallon cooler, flashlights, and a sleeping bag. The same day, at a hardware store, he bought a towel, three bags of cement, five cans of quick-setting agent for the cement, a stirrer, a plastic box, a paintbrush, a bucket, and a broom. At a third shop, he bought chisels, a hammer, wire, a knife, scissors, gloves, plastic bags, an axe, a handsaw, and a chain saw. The staff at several of the shops remembered that Obara had telephoned the day before, describing exactly what he needed and confirming that his requisites were in stock.

Then there were notebooks and diaries filled with Obara’s handwriting and dating back to his high school days and audiocassettes recording telephone conversations and spoken memos to himself, manifestos of intention and resolve. One especially rich source of material was a binder containing loose leaves of paper, which was described at length in a document prepared by the prosecutors:

The defendant lists the names of the women with whom he has had sexual relations since 1970 and the conduct of their sexual intercourse. In this notebook, starting with the entry “I administered sleeping drugs” in April 1970, he records sexual acts with numerous women after administering sleeping drugs and chloroform …

At the beginning of the book, there is a record of the number of people with whom he has had sexual relations in each year, such as “1990 nine people, 1991 nine people,” and there is a record of the number of people with whom he has had sexual relations by nationality … and there is also a record of the conduct of his sexual relations with 209 women between around 1970 when the defendant was 17 years old and 1995 when the defendant was 33 years old.

… There is a note (1970, 4th woman) to the effect that “I got a woman drunk and gave her a sleeping drug, but could not have intercourse because she was a virgin,” regarding an experience in 1969. There is also a mention to the effect of using “Hyminal” [a sedative, also known as Quaalude] (1970, 3rd woman), “Chloroform, sleeping drug” (1973, woman no. 26), “SMYK (sleeping drug)” (1981, woman no. 63), “speciality SMY (sleeping drug)” (1983, woman no. 95), “CRO … HOL (chloroform),” “SMY” (1983, women no. 97, 98), and “sMY ice cream.” It can be acknowledged that from his early days, he was repeatedly committing quasi-rape using sleeping drugs and chloroform.

Moreover, the defendant writes that having sex with women using sleeping drugs and chloroform is the defendant’s modus operandi. For example

“I do it in the flat following the usual pattern. SY (sleeping drug) was good, but CRORO (chloroform) was unnecessary, and (she) ended up vomiting badly.” (woman no. 150)

“Made her sleep in the flat with SMY ice cream
+
chocolate, and then PV (porn video).”

He writes that from around 1983, he has been taking photos of, and filming with a video camera, the rape scenes, such as “full-scale VTR (video) No. 1” (woman no. 139), “PV (porn video),” “PP (porn photo)” (woman no. 152), “foreigner video No. 1” (woman no. 160), “went to Zushi, like always, FC (fuck), PV” (woman no. 162).

The police pounced immediately upon the videos, of course. They littered the apartments, some unmarked, others with a woman’s name and a date scribbled on a label. They dated back to the 1980s; some of them were in the long-obsolete Betamax format. Once they had dug out and dusted off a machine capable of replaying them, the detectives worked in relays, loading and watching the flickering films, rewinding, carefully logging content and duration. It quickly became clear that the videos followed a pattern.

They were in color and of good quality. Some began with a brief preamble of one young woman or another laughing, raising a glass, and drinking. Then they cut abruptly to the central scene: the same young woman, naked, lying on a bed. Her eyes were closed, and she was motionless, but her slow breathing was visible. Sometimes she lay on her front and sometimes on her back; often, her legs were tied to hooks to keep them apart. Powerful lamps stood on either side of the bed to illuminate the activity on it.

The camera was steady and unwobbling, as if mounted on a tripod. In a moment, a man entered the picture. He too was naked. “His body was normal,” someone who had seen the videos told me. “No sign that he exercised very much—the ordinary body of a middle-aged man.” Only one thing about him was outstanding and sinister: in many of the films, he wore a mask.

I spoke to three people who had seen the videos or the detailed dossier of still photographs taken from them by the prosecutors, and each had a different recollection of the mask. One said that it was gray and concealed the entire face, like a bank robber; another remembered that it was black and covered only the eyes, like the mask of Zorro; the third thought that it had yellow and black stripes, like the skin of a tiger.

The penis of the man in the mask was erect. Before the steady gaze of the camera, he embarked on a long and rigorous violation of the unconscious woman.

“He does various things,” one man who had seen the dossier told me. “Sex in a normal position. Sometimes anal sex. Sometimes he uses … tools, and objects. The kind of instruments that doctors use. He would look inside, if you understand what I mean. And a cucumber—insert it. His penis is … in a normal state. There were lights on both sides of the bed, and sometimes while … having sex enthusiastically, he failed to pay attention and the lights touched the woman’s naked body.”

Off camera there were two television monitors. According to Obara’s own explanation, one of them played a foreign pornographic film, while another relayed the live image of him engaged in his “play.” He would look up at these for further visual stimulation. “His libido was very strong,” one witness to the videos told me. “He was always active, he never rested.” After the completion of one sexual act, he would begin again. Sometimes, there were two, or even three, videotapes of the same woman filmed at a single session, which might go on for hours. “He treats women as things, not as people,” I was told. “Those women show almost no reaction at all, they hardly made a noise.” And whenever one of his costars did show signs of stirring from her stupor, Obara always did the same thing: he would reach for a piece of towel or gauze and hold it under the nose of his victim, close to, but not touching, the face. With that, her struggles would cease.

There were wildly different accounts of the quantity of videocassettes. One report said that the police had recovered a thousand of them, another that there were 4,800. Superintendent Udo told me that there were 170, and that they featured more than 150 different women. But the court noted that there were 40, and Obara claimed the number was as few as 9. By Udo’s account, more than half of Obara’s partners were foreigners, but many were Japanese. But there was something else about the two kinds of women that set them apart, other than their race.

Most of the foreign girls recognizably bore the hostess stamp: tall, slim, groomed, made up, and often, although not always, blond. But physically, the Japanese were of a different type. Many of them were stout and plump, or frankly fat, with none of the conventional prettiness of the gaijin girls. “With a Japanese girl, my preference is that she should be ugly and have no bodily curves,” Obara would say later. “After I had talked to them often [on the telephone], I came to recognize their body type. Those who had a dry voice were skinny, while those with a moist voice were fat.” He said, “I like an ugly girl. Selecting an ugly one is part of my play. I like ugly play with an ugly girl.”

He chose his foreign partners, or so he claimed, according to the same criteria. “Foreign hostesses are all ugly,” he said. “Not in the sense of appearance, but in their minds.” Years later, an account would be published, in English, of “conquest play” from Obara’s point of view. It is full of self-serving distortions and evasiveness, but it conveys the sacramental quality of the performance.

Before his “play” the accused pours into a small shot glass nasty liquid with [a] burning smell, commonly known as “Philippine liquor.” Then he and his female “partner” drinks [
sic
] from the glass in turn. The accused drinks two glasses of the liquid.

As made clear at court, Obara loses the last bit of his sense of shame after drinking two glasses of the liquid. Then, the accused alone takes great quantity of a stimulant. His “partner,” as she continues to drink the “Philippine liquor,” loses her consciousness. Then the accused puts on a mask and begins the “play.” This mask makes him turn into someone else, a person outside the ordinary. Then he gets into his nasty “play.”

To “play” with, the accused preferred non-Japanese bar hostesses who were drug-addicted, punk women (with a mean personality), known as “bitches” … He also chose his “play partners” from those [Japanese] women searching for some male company over the phone. In such a case, the accused preferred waistless, plumpy women who were often compared to a pig or a hippopotamus. Under a mask, Obara had his nasty “play” with such ugly women.

After Obara’s arrest, Clara Mendez was invited back to the investigation headquarters. There the police showed her images from the videos, of the night in 1996 when she had gone to Joji Obara’s apartment in Zushi, and the missing hours after she had sipped her drink. “They spared me the worst of it,” she said. “They were just pictures, still pictures they’d taken from the video so I could identify myself. It was just me, unconscious, lying on the bed, still in my clothes. It was … very creepy. I just looked like a doll, a girl-shaped doll.”

*   *   *

Among the list of names and videos, the police found other women they knew: Katie Vickers and Christa Mackenzie. They followed the telephone numbers and addresses on the list and identified a dozen more. Much of the information was too vague to identify the victims, and many of the foreign girls had left Japan years before for untraceable destinations. Several of those whom they did find were unwilling to cooperate, out of shame, or timidity, or a wish to forget the whole story. Other cases would have been difficult to bring to trial for other reasons—such as Isobel Parker, who had taken her own action against Obara by successfully blackmailing him. But the detectives found several women for whom the combination of a video and the testimony of a credible victim made a strong case.

On November 17, the prosecutors formally charged Obara with drugging and raping Katie Vickers. They immediately “rearrested” him on suspicion of doing the same to a thirty-one-year-old Japanese woman named Fusako Yoshimoto. On December 8, they charged him with that rape and arrested him for another against twenty-year-old Itsuko Oshihara, followed in 2001 by twenty-five-year-old Megumi Mori. To the usual charge of rape and drugging was added one of causing a burn to Megumi Mori’s leg—from the heat of the lights that had pressed against the skin of the unconscious woman.

The day after Lucie’s disappearance, the police discovered, Obara had called the Zushi Fire Station, asking for Department Headquarters. According to one newspaper, he said, “Something serious has happened. Please tell me where the emergency hospital is.” He called the number of the hospital that he was given. The conversation, in which he inquired about its opening hours, was recorded, but he never appeared. A few days later, he did turn up at a hospital in Tokyo, where he was treated for a rash caused by caterpillars.

The police were sure that they knew what had happened. They believed Obara had drugged and killed Lucie, and somehow disposed of her body. But how could they prove it? Lucie was not on the list of names, and there was no video of her. They could show that she and Obara had spent that afternoon together, and that after her disappearance he had behaved suspiciously. But what exactly had he done to her? And where was Lucie now?

The detectives searched the garden of the house at Den-en Chofu and open areas close to his other properties. They probed the ground with hollow rods of bamboo, and half a dozen policemen with sniffer dogs combed the beach and the cliffs close to Blue Sea Aburatsubo. It was anxious work, for the grass and weeds in the area were thick and littered with rubbish, and the detectives were afraid that they would disturb poisonous snakes.

17. CARITA

For Lucie’s family and friends, there was little comfort in Joji Obara’s arrest. In itself, the news did nothing to dent the mass of pain and uncertainty weighing down upon them. The Tokyo police never shared with the Blackmans their conviction that Lucie was dead; in fact, apart from the fact of Obara’s arrest, they told them very little at all. The Blackmans gleaned a little of the leaked titbits that were published in the Japanese, and sometimes the British, newspapers, and the Lucie Hotline continued to generate sporadic, and useless, information. Louise Phillips, who had finally flown home after weeks of questioning, had been ordered by the police to tell the Blackmans nothing. Tim and Sophie flew out again to Tokyo in the middle of November but, in his meeting with them, Superintendent Mitsuzane maintained the official pretense—that, for the time being, Obara was being investigated for a series of rapes and, although the police were still pursuing Lucie’s disappearance with vigor, there could not at present be said to be a connection between the two cases.