Issei Sagawa

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Issei Sagawa (佐川一政 Sagawa Issei?, born 11 June 1949) is a Japanese man who in 1981 murdered and cannibalized a Dutch woman named Renée Hartevelt. After his release, Sagawa became a food critic for the Japanese magazine Spa.[1]

Contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early life

Sagawa was born in Kobe, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan to wealthy parents. As a student he was obsessed with tall Western women. While studying for an English literature degree at the University of Paris, he became attracted to a Dutch female student.[citation needed]

[edit] Murder of Hartevelt

Sagawa served time in a French jail for the murder of the Dutch student Renée Hartevelt, a classmate at the Sorbonne Academy in Paris, France. On 11 June 1981, Sagawa, a student of avant garde literature, invited Hartevelt to dinner under the pretense of literary conversation. Upon her arrival, he shot her in the neck with a rifle while she sat with her back to him at a desk, then began to carry out his plan of eating her. She was selected because of her health and beauty, those characteristics Sagawa believed he lacked. In interviews, Sagawa describes himself as a "weak, ugly, and small man" and claims that he wanted to "absorb her energy".[citation needed]

Sagawa said he fainted after the shock of shooting her, but awoke with the realization that he had to carry out his desire to eat her. He did so, beginning with her hips & legs, after having sex with the corpse. In interviews, he noted his surprise at the "corn-colored" nature of human fat. For two days, Sagawa ate various parts of her body. He described the meat as "soft" and "odorless", like tuna. After two days, he dumped the mutilated body in a park, but was seen in the act. Five days later, he was arrested by the French police. French psychologists found him legally insane and unfit to stand trial. His wealthy father, Akira Sagawa, had him extradited back to Japan where he was put in a mental institution and released within fifteen months. The deportation order did not specify how long Sagawa must remain in the institution, and Japanese authorities were refused the necessary paperwork from French justice officials.[2] As a result, fifteen months later, Sagawa checked himself out, and he has been a free man ever since.[citation needed]

This is how Issei Sagawa describes the events leading up to the murder, and the murder itself

She accepted for the evening of June 11, 1981, and Sagawa prepared himself to act out his ultimate fantasy.

Upon arriving in Paris, he had purchased a .22-caliber rifle "for self-protection." He had it ready when Renee arrived. He seated her on the floor, Japanese-style, to drink tea. Into her drink, he put some whiskey to make her more pliant. They talked for a while as Sagawa waited for the whiskey to have its effect. Then he told Renee that he loved her and wanted to take her to bed.

She resisted him. She found him engaging but not sexually attractive. She wanted only to be his friend.

Sagawa nodded. He then got up to get the book of poetry, while Renee sat on a chair. Sagawa handed the poem to Renee to read and started the recorder.

While Renee recited the poem in her native language, Sagawa came up behind her with his rifle and shot her in the back of the neck. She fell off the chair. He continued to talk to her but she failed to answer. He was surprised by how quiet it was. Then he noticed the amount of blood that flowed out of her wound. At first, he attempted to clean it up, he finally gave up.

He then undressed her, finding it difficult to remove clothing from a corpse. But he was pleased that now she could no longer refuse his advances. She belonged to him. Then he got a knife and used it to cut off the tip of her left breast and a piece of her nose. These he consumed.

"I touched her hip," he later wrote in his fictional account, In the Fog, "and wondered where I should bite first." He chose her right buttock, but he found it difficult to bite into, and then realized he had a headache. He then went on to describe, moment by moment, the appearance of her fat and muscle, and the taste of it.

As fat oozed out of one stab wounds, Sagawa said it had the consistency and appearance of yellow corn. He smelled it and found that it had no odor. Cutting deeper to find the flesh, he placed a chunk into his mouth. "[It] melted in my mouth like raw tuna in a sushi restaurant."

To him, there was nothing more delicious, and he looked into Renee's dead eyes to tell her so. He was ecstatic now that he had indulged himself in his fantasy. He had this gorgeous body all to himself. It had taken him until the age of 32 to consummate his desires, but he had done it.

Then he got serious. Using an electric carving knife, Sagawa began to cut Renee into parts. He laid out strips of flesh to store for later and nibbled on a few pieces raw. Then he made a quick meal of fried human flesh with mustard. He took photographs of the mutilated corpse and had sex with it. "When I hug her," he recorded, "she lets out a breath." He told her that he loved her.

As he cooked and ate more of her remains, he listened to the recording he had made of her reading the poem. When he was finished, he used her underwear as a napkin to wipe his mouth. He then returned to her body, cut off a breast and baked it, but disliked the greasy consistency. He found that he preferred her thighs.

When he finally felt exhausted, he took what was left of the corpse into his bed to sleep with it. He knew that in the morning he would have to prepare to get rid of the evidence.

The next day, finding that the body did not yet smell, he continued to try parts of it, in particular the arm that had so fascinated him. He chewed on it all the way from the underarm to the elbow. "I had no idea," he wrote, "that it would taste so good."

Sagawa was curious about a few of the body parts that seemed more repulsive. He hesitated over what to do, but decided to go ahead and indulge. Cutting out the anus, he put it into his mouth, but the smell overpowered him, so he spit it out. He tried frying it, but that failed to diminish the odor, so he gave up and returned to the body.

By this time, several large flies swarmed around the corpse, so Sagawa took that as a sign that he'd lost Renee. The "honeymoon" was over.

He then used a hatchet to chop her into pieces that would fit into the suitcases he'd bought specifically for this purpose. Yet even as he dismembered her, he grew excited, so he used her hand to masturbate. Then he chewed on her nose and heard the noise of the cartilage crunching. Since he'd often thought about chewing on her lip, he removed it and set it aside. That part he would keep for later pleasures.

"I want her tongue," he said in his fictional account. "I can't open her lower jaw, but I can reach in between her teeth. Finally it comes out." He cut it off, popped it into his mouth and watched himself chewing it in the mirror. Then he went for the eyes.

The final step for Sagawa was to explore the internal organs, which stung his hands with digestive acid, and then used the hatchet to cut off her head. With so many parts removed, it looked like a skull. He grabbed the hair and hung the head in front of him, an experience that in retrospect caused him to say, "I realized I am a cannibal."

[edit] Post-release

Sagawa now lives in Tokyo and is a minor celebrity in Japan. He is often invited as a guest speaker and commentator. He also writes restaurant reviews. In 1992, he appeared in Hisayasu Sato's film Sisenjiyou no Aria (The Bedroom) as a sadosexual voyeur.[3]

Besides books about the murder he committed, Sagawa wrote a commentary book Shonen A in 1997 on the Kobe children's serial murder of 1997, when a 14-year-old called "Boy A" ("Shonen A") killed and decapitated a child.[citation needed]

Sagawa's story inspired the 1981 Stranglers song "La Folie" and the 1983 Rolling Stones song "Too Much Blood".[citation needed] In 2007, the Avant-garde noise-metal band Gnaw their Tongues released an EP titled "Issei Sagawa," the cover of which depicts Sagawa posed with a fork and knife over what appears to be a pair of human legs. [4]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Kenneth G. Henshall, Dimensions of Japanese society: gender, margins and mainstream, rev.ed. Palgrave Macmillan, London 1999 p.207
  2. ^ New Criminologist : Issei Sagawa: Celebrity Cannibal
  3. ^ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105392/
  4. ^ http://www.spirit-of-metal.com/album-groupe-Gnaw_Their_Tongues-nom_album-Issei_Sagawa-l-en.html

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issei_Sagawa"
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