People Who Eat Darkness

 

Richard Lloyd Parry has extensive experience writing about Indonesia, and Asia generally, and he brings this to bear in his 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.  Every culture is inherently misogynistic in its way.  Japan has unique expressions of this universal form of hate, and Parry examines them fairly and in context.  There is always the sense of the “other” in books like these, particularly when a violent crime occurs.  Parry keeps us grounded and helps us think sensibly about a place so different from our own.