Munch, Munch

"Monday morning you sure look fine, Friday I've got traveling on my mind..."
     - Mac, Fleetwood

A new week - wonky downstairs plumbing, a reputed big twist on Downton Abbey (pretty sure I know what it is), Gabriel home sick from school, cold weather outside, and a new Ian McEwan book to read (Sweet Tooth).  We can make this work! 

What else?  Mindy McCready is dead (another Celebrity Rehab-er bites the dust) and the new Die Hard barely won the box office weekend, barely besting Identity Thief.  Safe Haven opened in third place, followed by Escape From Planet Earth (whatever that is), and Warm Bodies. 

Can I recommend an early candidate for the best book of the year? 

Richard Lloyd Parry's People Who Eat Darkness (2012) is a stunning, transfixing true-life account of the disappearance of a young British woman, Lucie Blackman, from the streets of Tokyo in July of 2000.  Parry, a journalist and Times' Tokyo bureau chief who lived in Tokyo during the ensuing hoopla and decade-long court proceedings, gives us everything we want here:
- a probing look into Lucie's life and the reasons she went to Japan
- a rounded, even-handed picture of the fractured Blackman family and the growing controversy regarding patriarch Tim's mysteriously non-grieving behavior
- insight into the life of a "hostess," the controversial, oft-misunderstood employment Lucie took
- the red-tape and insufficiency of the Japanese police
- the historical relationship between Koreans and the Japanese
- a searing, complicated portrait of the man eventually charged with Lucie's disappearance - Joji Obara, a long-overlooked, friendless, wealthy rapist.    


Fast-paced, intense, accessible, the book reads like a great thriller with a great villain.  Parry's involvement in the investigation ups the ante.  He presents the material cogently and clearly, never letting personal opinions or bias really get in the way.  He limns a delicate, exotic society very well.  What I admired most about the sad, haunting book is that, even long after we are told of the outcome of the court proceedings (and Obara's fate), we're still left unclear on motive.  Why did any of this happen?  What is evil?  What is justice, really?  The author freely admits that he doesn't know - and neither do we.