Zushi

Zushi enters the investigation as a place connected to a pattern of assaults and to evidence gathered from Joji Obara’s property. Its importance is concrete but limited: accounts tied a coastal apartment in Zushi to an earlier assault, and police later collected recordings from a condominium in the Zushi area. The recordings established the scale of Obara’s crimes, but did not show Lucie Blackman or settle what had happened to her.

A coastal address becomes a lead

A customer known as Yuji was described as taking a hostess on a drive to the coast, bringing her to the Izu Marina, and then taking her to his apartment in Zushi. There, he drugged and assaulted her. The woman wanted to go to the police, but Slick talked her out of it; he later passed investigators what he knew, including the marina’s name. That information became a break in the inquiry. Zushi was therefore linked to the case first through a survivor’s account relayed by a club manager, rather than through a direct sighting of Lucie.

A separate account in the case materials describes a defendant meeting a woman outside the Akasaka Tokyu Hotel and driving her to his established address in Zushi, where he videotaped her with the ocean behind them. The account then places the pair at Izu Marina Building Number 4, room 4314. These details connect the Zushi address and the named apartment to the same sequence in the record, while preserving the account’s distinction between the address and the subsequent apartment setting.

Obara’s property and the recorded assaults

Police later collected videotapes from Obara’s former home in Setagaya Ward and from a second home, described as a condominium in the Zushi area. The tapes documented assaults on more than a hundred mostly Caucasian women, all appearing unable to resist. Their number and contents made the Zushi-area property an important source of evidence about the repeated nature of Obara’s crimes.

The recordings did not include Lucie. They were arranged in roughly chronological order, but none came from the period around her disappearance. Obara was indicted on an initial charge at the end of October and continued to say nothing. Thus, the Zushi material strengthened the case against him for other assaults without resolving the central question of Lucie’s fate.

What the location establishes—and what it does not

The book presents Zushi as both a setting in an account of an earlier assault and the area of a property from which police recovered evidence. These strands helped investigators connect reports about a customer using coastal outings with a broader pattern of drug-facilitated sexual assaults. The location’s investigative value rests on that convergence of testimony, addresses, and recordings.

But the connection has a clear boundary: Lucie does not appear on the tapes, and the account does not establish that she was taken to Zushi. The place advances the investigation by corroborating a pattern around Obara, not by providing a direct answer about Lucie.