Have you ever had a dream that increasingly
made you want to commit a crime?
Issei Sagawa did. ---He is one well known
in both Japan and internationally. Sagawa
is the man who killed and consumed a woman;
most notably, he’s the man who got away
with it.
Sagawa says that his obsession with human
flesh began when he was just a child. He always
felt himself to be an undesirable person,
--and when the peak of his puberty, he turned
him into a skinny man --of barely five feet,
and, he only resented himself even more.
Sagawa was a premature baby and he’s theorized
that this self-hatred might have contributed
to his fascination with cannibalism.
He describes himself as a “weak, ugly and
small man,” and after committing the crime
of killing and eating a healthy-- beautiful
woman, he claims one of the reasons in doing
so was that he wanted to “absorb her energy”.
---
Sagawa practiced an amount of restraint, as
his urges to consume human flesh became "fetishist".
He never acted on his secret yearnings, until
his college years, even as his desires became
more sexualized. He decided to learn German
while attending Wako University in Tokyo.
While his desire to learn German was probably
real too, his desire for the woman teaching
him began to overpower him.
He told a British reporter, “When I saw
this woman in the street I wondered if I could
eat her”.
Sagawa did not care for women of his own ethnicity.
It was tall, blonde, European women that he
considered being “the perfect woman,”
and at this point, he was intent on getting
what he wanted. One summer day, he followed
this woman home and climbed into her apartment.
As luck would have it, she was asleep.
Having made no actual plan, he began to search
the room for an implement to kill the woman
with so he could eat her. Just as he spotted
an umbrella that he thought might be up to
the task of stabbing her, the woman woke up,
saw him standing there, and screamed. Sagawa
fled.
After this breaking and entering incident,
he did actually seek help. He saw a psychiatrist
and started to confess his deviant desires.
Sagawa struck the psychiatrist as a "danger
to society", since he had already begun to
act out his fantasies. When the psychiatrist
proceeded to categorize Sagawa as highly dangerous,
Sagawa’s father (a wealthy man), constructed
a cover-up and sent him to a school overseas.
--------In 1981, Sagawa began studying at
the University of Paris, Sorbonne. He had
not forgotten about how close he had come
to fulfilling his fantasy in Tokyo. He became
convinced that if he had only been better
prepared, he could have succeeded in his dream
of eating a woman.
One day, he encountered another tall, blonde
woman. She was a 25-year-old Dutch student,
named Renee, who was studying for a Ph.D.
in French literature. Sagawa could not get
out of his head-- "the smooth, white skin
of Renee’s arms:. Eventually, he decided
he must devise a way to get close to her.
Sagawa’s father, once again had a hand in
helping his son escalate, albeit, this time,
unknowingly. He would use his father’s wealth
to employ Renee, as his private German tutor.
He gave her a healthy amount of wages. Over
time, Renee and Sagawa developed a friendship,
one where he would take Renee to art exhibits,
and invite her over for dinner (a preamble
to what would come).
According to him, Renee liked being with him
because of his obvious intelligence, and ability
to discuss a wide array of artistic topics.
Sagawa had made romantic advances on Renee
before, but she insisted they stay only friends
because she didn’t like him in a sexual
way.
One fateful night, Sagawa decided it was time
to take matters into his own hands and carry
out his full plan. He gave Renee a German
poem to read under the false pretense that
he wanted to record her fluent reading. He
then took out a .22-caliber rifle and shot
Renee in the back of the neck.
Sagawa fainted after having shot Renee and
when he came to he actually considered calling
an ambulance. After a moment of consideration
though, he told himself that he would be insane
to give up a chance to live out his lifelong
fantasy. So at the age of 32, Issei Sagawa
had his first taste of human flesh.
The first thing he did was undress, Renee.
He was pleased with the fact that she could
no longer refuse him. He felt that she belonged
to him now and that he would do everything
in his power to fully possess her. The first
piece of human meat Sagawa tasted was the
nipple of her left breast and the tip of her
nose. These pieces he cut off with a knife,
but he wanted to know what it felt like to
bite into her with his teeth.
Biting into another human was something he
had fantasized about since first grade when
he had fixated on the thigh of a male classmate
of his. Sagawa says in his fictionalized account
of the murder, In the Fog, “I touched her
hip and wondered where I should bite first”.
In the end, he chose her right buttock, but
found it too difficult to pierce the flesh
with teeth. Sagawa resorted to continuing
to use a butcher knife to cut into her and
marveled at the corn-like color and consistency
of human fat. Sagawa noted that it took him
a long time to actually reach muscle when
cutting into her buttock, but when he finally
did, he tore off a chunk with his fingers
and savored the taste.
Sagawa continued to try different parts of
Renee’s body, doing things like frying it
and consuming it with mustard. Sagawa took
pictures of Renee’s mutilated and corpse
and had sex with it late into the night while
he listened to the recording of her reading
the German poem.
In the morning he ate more. Sagawa particularly
relished the white flesh of her arm that he
had been so fixated on before, but knew it
was time to get rid of the body. Sagawa chopped
off her lips as well as some other choice
morsels to enjoy later and began cutting the
corpse into pieces with a hatchet. Sagawa
says that when he held her decapitated head
by the hair in front of him it was then that
“I realized I am a cannibal”.
His plan was to dispose of her in a lake.
Sagawa put the leftover pieces of Renee’s
body into suitcases and hailed a cab. When
people began to stare at Sagawa struggling
with his heavy, bloody suitcases, he got spooked
and decided to just leave the suitcases on
the ground. Sagawa ran home to enjoy whatever
other cuts of Renee’s body that he could
before getting caught.
French police arrived at Sagawa’s apartment
two days later with a search warrant. They
found pieces of Renee in the freezer and Sagawa
did not even attempt to deny what he had done.
He said to the police “I killed her to eat
her flesh”, and they arrested him on the
spot.
When Sagawa stood trial the details that he
began to relay about his crime were so indecent
that the judge decided he wasn’t incompetent
to stand trial. As a result, Sagawa was sent
to Paul Guiraud Asylum
Once again, Sagawa’s wealthy father, Akira
Sagawa, enabled his son’s actions. Akira
Sagawa worked out a deal with French authorities
to have Issei Sagawa transferred to a psychiatric
hospital in Japan. That in and of itself wouldn’t
have been so bad if the French court hadn’t
already deemed him unfit to stand trial. Issei
Sagawa’s charges were dropped and off he
went to return home.
Japanese authorities were unable to press
any charges without the criminal paperwork
from his crime’s country of origin. Sagawa
had stayed in a Japanese psychiatric hospital
for only fifteen months when he checked himself
out in August of 1985. Just five years after
his crime, Sagawa was a free man..
Issei Sagawa not only walks the streets free
today, but makes money off of recounting his
crime and talking about his cannibalistic
condition. If you can possibly believe it,
Sagawa has even been granted a passport to
go to Germany before.
Not many people can say they’ve gotten away
with murder, and certainly not as publicly
as this man does. Issei Sagawa remains a minor
celebrity even presently, appearing as a guest
on talk shows and enthusiastically relating
the account of his crime. Sagawa has even
published a book on the pleasure of cannibalism
and tried his hand at making his crime into
a comic book.
So how on Earth, you may be asking, is a man
who flaunts his crime, not in jail? How can
a murderous cannibal be free to go about his
business in the public sphere?
