BLACK BOX

A Japanese journalist’s story of surviving rape and kick-starting Japan’s #MeToo movement.

In 2015, Ito was an ambitious young journalist making a name for herself by reporting on serious international issues in more than 60 countries around the world. She agreed to have a meal with Noriyuki Yamaguchi, the Washington bureau chief of the Tokyo Broadcasting System; the two had met in 2013 when Ito was working at a piano bar in New York City to support herself while attending journalism school. Yamaguchi had promised to help Ito with her career, and the meeting was ostensibly to discuss a possible internship. The prospect required that she leave Japan, where she had a job at Reuters. Instead of discussing immigration issues and the process of securing a visa for her travel, Yamaguchi plied Ito with drinks, which Ito suspects that he drugged. After blacking out, she woke up in a strange hotel room to find Yamaguchi raping her. Regarding the violent assault, the author writes viscerally: “Intellectually, I thought I had understood, but I had not realized what a devastating and destructive act it is. Something had been brutally obliterated.” Ito spent the next several years desperately seeking justice while dealing with the cruelties of Japan’s policing system. At one point, for example, the police forced her to reenact the assault using a life-sized doll in the police judo studio; during the process, the police asked her inappropriate questions about her virginity. Eventually, unsatisfied with the police, Ito decided to conduct her own journalistic investigation into the events of that night, determined to find out—and document—what really happened. This unflinching, heavily researched book shimmers with vulnerability, introspection, and purpose as the author skillfully lays the facts alongside the physical and emotional tolls they had on her.

A memoir about sexual assault written with devastating moral and emotional clarity.