" Christa had quickly discovered one of the defining features of life as a foreigner in Japan and the reason it attracts so many misfits of different kinds: personal alienation, that inescapable sense of being different from everyone else, is canceled out by the larger, universal alienation of being a gaijin. "

― Richard Lloyd Parry , People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo--and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up