People Who Eat Darkness (7 page)

They were in no doubt that Lucie had been with them. “She was round at my mum’s,” Sam said. “And the thing that struck us the most was the fact that she hadn’t made her list of things to do. She’d got a few bits together, but she wasn’t all packed and organized like she usually was. And she was a bit sad about leaving, a bit reluctant. She kept pointing out the negatives but then talking herself back into it. It was as if she wasn’t quite convinced, but she’d done it now and there was no going back. I think because she’d made a commitment to Louise, she didn’t want to let her down.”

Val remembers Lucie talking to her about Jane and about the atmosphere at home. “There was screaming in that house,” Val said. “There was lots of screaming between Jane and Sophie and Sophie and Lucie. If she’d stuck with it, in a few years’ time it would have righted itself and everything would have been a bit more bearable. But Lucie was the adult and Jane was the child at that time. Lucie told me it was a lot of pressure. They were arguing about her going away and I think that strengthened Lucie’s resolve. Because maybe Lucie felt she didn’t have a way out, and at that time going to Japan was a way out … She needed that break, even to the point of leaving Jane.”

*   *   *

In Sophie’s recollection of events, Alex came around to the house in the evening, and Sophie left him and Lucie together. “After I’d gone to bed,” she said, “I began to think of the things I wanted to say to Lucie before she went away, and I thought I’d write them down. I began what was meant to be a farewell note, and it became something intense. I started to say how nice it was to have grown up having a big sister to protect me and look after me, and how she had helped me in hard parts of my life. It developed into an eighteen-page letter. I remember writing it, and I was really teary—not just a bit upset, I was properly sobbing. I always find it ghastly to say, ‘It’s almost as if I was writing to her for the last time.’ But it was a painful experience. She was only going away for three months; she’d been away before. But there was something about this letter that was heartbreaking.

“There was something very final about it. On Lucie’s trips with BA, we’d say goodbye but make plans. But when Lucie talked about Japan, I wasn’t able to picture what it would be like when she got back. I found it difficult to create in my mind an image of her return.”

The flight to Tokyo left at noon. It was Louise’s mother, Maureen Phillips, who came for Lucie before dawn and drove the two friends to Heathrow. Lucie came into Sophie’s room in the dark and kissed her goodbye. “She gave me a card, and I gave her my letter, and said, ‘Don’t open it until you’re on the plane.’ She lay down on my bed and snuggled up. We were both quite emotional. Then she had to go. I said, ‘I love you,’ and she left.”

Lucie was twenty-one years old when she left home for good. How loved she was by her friends and her troubled family: sibling, or even mother, to her own mother, as well as to her brother and her sister. She had flown on many aeroplanes before, but this was the first time that she had traveled so far and so directly away from everyone with a claim upon her—and to a country through the looking glass, a place as distant and as obscure as anyone who knew her could imagine. Those who cared for her were anxious. In the last weeks, Lucie—whose heart had always seemed so open and clear—had acquired mysteries. No one, except Louise perhaps, knew the whole story of what the two of them expected in Japan and what they intended. Questions were asked, but the answers brought no clarity or satisfaction. The truth about Lucie Blackman was already becoming hazy.

PART TWO TOKYO

4. HIGH TOUCH TOWN

It takes fewer than twelve hours to fly from Heathrow to Narita Airport, but few single journeys bring such a dizzying sense of transition. Lucie and Louise lifted off to views of London rooftops, the fields of East Anglia, and the North Sea. By the time lunch had been served and the first film shown, they were above Siberia, where they remained for seven hours. Unimaginable volumes of empty space gaped on all sides; forty thousand feet below were expanses of tundra, churning mountain ranges blown with snow, dark rivers of vast width shining as the sun caught them. It was a journey that pitched the traveler forward through time as well as space. The two friends left at midday, flew through a long afternoon and evening, and landed at what their bodies registered as bedtime—blinking in the brightness of a Japanese morning.

“It’s 9:13 here in Tokyo, making it 12:10 midnight behind in England,” Lucie wrote in her diary minutes after arriving. “I am sitting on a suitcase at the railway underground feeling completely overwhelmed. I am very tired … also afraid, anxious & lost & v. hot! I only hope that I will look back at this with hindsight & laugh at my innocence—of how I was so unaware of what was in store for me.”

For all their months flying as air stewardesses, neither Lucie nor Louise had ever been to a country so immediately and intriguingly alien. The barbed-wire guard towers of Narita Airport looked out over paddies of green rice, and red, yellow, and black banners representing stylized carp fluttered from the tiled roofs of the houses. But these tokens of the Orient quickly gave way to the margins of Greater Tokyo, which overflowed the administrative boundaries of the city, sucking in satellite towns like a greedy amoeba. The railway rode high above a numb landscape of silvery-gray office buildings, low-rise apartments with metal fire escapes, and windowless love hotels with neon signs bearing names like Marie Celeste and Wonderland. Then came a sequence of bridges across broad, motionless rivers, and finally the view south to Tokyo Bay, with its islands of reclaimed land built over in glass and aluminum. In cloudy weather, the water was dark and oily and the buildings matte and dead. In sunlight, they shone silver: adamantine towers, immense goggling globes, the bristling power lines and bulbous storage tanks of power and petroleum plants, and the delicate curve of the Rainbow Bridge.

Thirty million people inhabited this megalopolis. Apart from the fleeting green of parks, shrines, temples, and the Imperial Palace, it was unbroken until the Okutama Mountains, forty miles to the west. Look out from Tokyo’s highest skyscraper and, except on the very clearest of days, that was all you could see—Tokyo and then just more of Tokyo, gray, brown, and silver, spilling shapelessly in every direction.

And yet the impression created by this scale and density was the opposite of chaotic. Tokyo was clean and sharply defined to the eye, with none of the blaring squalor of many Asian cities. Sealed beneath a film of indifferent calm, there was a machine energy and ticktocking efficiency. For most first-time arrivals, it was an atmosphere unlike any they had encountered before; it produced a sensation not of straightforward exhilaration but of obscure excitement at mysterious possibilities. “It’s so different already,” Lucie wrote on the platform of Narita Airport Station, a few hundred yards into Japan. “The most pristine train I have ever seen has just pulled away, aboard which stood a tiny man all in navy with the most immaculate white gloves. I’ve bought my first thing—a bottle of tap water top to toe in Japanese writing … I sit here and there is a warm breeze coming from somewhere & it is gently blowing on my face. I look up and pray it is the wind of change which is going to make all my dreams come true.”

To arrive in Tokyo was to be transformed in a way that felt almost like a physical metamorphosis. For a start, there was the debilitation of jet lag: what felt in the bones like the middle of the night was actually day, and vice versa. Even more crippling was the sudden deprivation of language: at a stroke, the foreigner was rendered not only incapable of speech or comprehension but also illiterate. The relative smallness of the people, the lower height of doors and ceilings, the narrowness of chairs, even the smaller portions of food created the illusion of having grown measurably in size, like Alice down the rabbit hole. In twenty-first-century Tokyo, people rarely stared openly at foreigners, but always one was conscious of being the object of an unaccustomed attention from the rest of the human population—not outright gawping, neither unambiguous affection nor disapproval, but simply the discreet registering of difference. In Japan, you became a citizen of a new nation—that of the gaijin, the foreigner. It was a stimulating and frequently exhausting realm in which to live. “Life here means never taking life for granted, never not noticing,” wrote the American expatriate writer Donald Richie. “It is with this live connection that the alert foreigner here lives. The electric current is turned on during all the waking hours: he or she is always occupied in noticing, evaluating, discovering and concluding … I like this life of never being able to take my life for granted.”

But this was not to be the experience of Lucie and Louise. Without even knowing that they were making the choice, they turned away from the Japaneseness of Japan. Lucie had fifty-nine days to live, and she would spend them in a few hundred square yards of Tokyo engineered for the pleasure and profit of gaijin: Roppongi.

*   *   *

In daytime, at least, you could drive straight through Roppongi and scarcely notice the place. From inside a car, it was no more than a busier-than-usual junction on the eight-lane road between Shibuya and the moats of the Imperial Palace. The Shuto elevated expressway ran above Roppongi Avenue, forming a concrete canopy overhead and making a dingy crevasse of the main road. Commercials flashed from a giant screen mounted high on one corner of the crossing; the eye darted over a McDonald’s, a pink coffee shop, a bank, a sushi bar. A pedestrian with time to take in the surroundings would notice the rows of eight- and ten-story buildings lining Outer Moat East Avenue, which cuts perpendicularly across Roppongi Avenue. Each one carried a narrow panel running vertically from roof to street level, bearing the names of the dozens of bars, clubs, and cafés within. The buildings were shabby concrete and beige tile; unlit tubes of neon sprouted from their façades, furred with dust and exhaust dirt. There were multiple pedestrian crossings and subway entrances, and engraved on the outer walls of the expressway, looking down over the crossing to north and south, Roppongi’s mysterious motto, written in English: “High Touch Town.”

During office hours, Roppongi gave itself over to people of the daylight—workers in the shops and restaurants, miniature schoolchildren in tiny uniforms, and the civil servants of the Japan Defense Agency in their walled compound north of the crossing. The changes began as afternoon became evening, and the suited population emptied the offices and filled the commuter trains. As the dark came in, individual neon lights began to twinkle on the sides of the buildings, and young foreign women began to converge on the fitness club behind Azabu Police Station. By the time they emerged two hours later, Roppongi was stirring from its vampire sleep. By midevening, the sound, smell, look, and touch of the area were transformed.

Early May, when Lucie and Louise arrived, was the point of transition from the cool to the hot months; over the weeks, the spring air became plump with heat and moisture. Nighttime was scarcely cooler than the day. In June, the rainy season began, a month of humidity so dense that it broke spontaneously on the skin. The summer brought out the fart smell of Tokyo’s shallow sewers, an unexpected stench of the Third World, which blended with the smoke of pizzas, grilled chicken, fish, and perfume. (The one smell that one never encountered in Japan was that of human sweat.) The giant advertising screen glowed above the crossing, bathing it in changing images of cars, clothes, alcohol, food, and girls. The neon on the signs pulsed into life, masking the shabbiness of the concrete buildings. And the migraine hum of the expressway was blocked out by the chatter of the pavement, the human traffic that imparted to Roppongi all of its life and character.

Compressed into a radius of a few hundred yards from the crossing was all the untidy human and ethnic diversity absent from the rest of Japan. Roppongi was not especially trendy. For quality, variety, or good value, Tokyo had many more interesting entertainment districts—elegant Ginza, with its old-fashioned department stores and middle-aged gentility; the edgy street life of Shinjuku, with its gangsters and sex shows; and Shibuya, domain of the glazed, ultrafashionable young. Foreigners were to be seen all over Tokyo, of course, but only in Roppongi was their presence the entire point of the place. Most of the people on the streets were Japanese. But those who stood out were not, and the foreignness of the atmosphere was Roppongi’s unique accent and identity.

There were foreigners who came here to be with other foreigners; there were Japanese who came here to be with foreigners; and then there were the foreigners, usually men, who came to be with the Japanese, mostly women, who wanted to be with foreign men. In Roppongi, you encountered people you would never meet anywhere else. This was the one place in Japan where that sense of exciting but oppressive separation, of gaijinness, lifted from the temples and shoulders.

*   *   *

Out of the mouth of the subway and across the swarming pedestrian crossing came faces from all over the world: Brazilian barmen, Iranian bricklayers, Russian models, German bankers, Irish students. Certain races monopolized certain trades: for some reason, for example, a foreigner who tried to sell you a framed photograph or picture (of a sunset, a smiling baby, a beautiful woman walking a poodle) would almost always be Israeli. Chinese and Korean women in long dresses lingered in front of “massage” parlors, seizing the sleeves of passing men and susurrating, “
Mass
ā
ji, mass
ā
ji, mass
ā
ji
…” When the American aircraft carrier the USS
Kitty Hawk
was in dock at the port of Yokosuka, the drinking places were tight with the torsos of American sailors and marines. At these times, there was a high incidence of another phenomenon rare outside Roppongi: the bar fight.