Lucie Blackman, a hostess at a Tokyo bar, was 21, aimless and dissatisfied with her life when she disappeared in the summer of 2000. The police were slow to respond — they assumed she was off on a romantic tryst — and it was only the relentless prodding of the victim’s father that forced them to launch the manhunt that ended with the arrest of the suspect, who took a further six years to try and convict. Richard Lloyd Parry, the Tokyo bureau chief for the Times of London, tells the story as a true-crime thriller, one that exposes another layer of the strangeness of Japanese society with every twist: its attitude toward foreigners, the culture of its police, its media, its racial and sexual politics. It’s the fate of all true-crime books to be compared to In Cold Blood, but this one stands up to the comparison better than most. Lloyd Parry isn’t the writer Capote was, but who is? And he’s a much better journalist.