4
" Nothing better caught the complexity of Tim's own character, his stubborn unorthodoxy, which to me was so likable and admirable but which to many people was repellent. Almost on principle, he refused the obvious point of view and the temptations of conventional morality. The high ground was his for the taking, but instead of marching ahead to claim it, he dawdled and skirted around it, finding shades of pathos and ambiguity where others could see only black and white. Onlookers were not merely puzzled by this-they were appalled.
Il Lucie Blackman's killing was not a straightforward example of good against evil, then what was? To be told by none other than her father that there was complexity here, to see Tim striving to be fair and sympathetic to his own daughter's killer undermined people's certainty in their own sense of right. They took Tim's lack of orthodoxy as an affront to their own. They identified him as a transgressor, almost a blasphemer, against acceptable ways of feeling. "
― 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
5
" They said goodbye to Carita, who lay peacefully in a coffin full of rose petals, and watched her disappear behind the steel doors of the furnace. None of them was prepared for what came next.
After a pause, they were led into a room on the other side of the building, and each given a pair of white gloves and chopsticks. In the room, on a steel sheet, were Carita's remains as they had emerged from the heat of the furnace. The incineration was incomplete. Wood, cloth, hair, and flesh had burned away, but the biggest bones, of the legs ans arms, as well as the skull, were cracked but recognizable. Rather than a neat box of ashes, the Ridgways were confronted with Carita's calcined skeleton. As the family, their task, a traditional part of every Japanese cremation, was to pick up her bones with the chopsticks and place them in the urn.
"Rob couldn't handle it at all," Nigel said. "He thought we were monsters even to think of it. But perhaps it's because we were the parents, and she was our daughter... It sounds macabre, as I tell you about it now, but it didn't feel that way at the time. It was something emotional. It almost made me feel calmer. I felt as if we were looking after Carita."
Nigel, Annette and Sam picked up the bigger bones and placed them in the urn with the ashes. The bigger pieces of the skull went on the top. "
― 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
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