Issei Sagawa : Japan’s Celebrity Cannibal Skip to main content

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Notes from Underground

  And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment.  Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
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Hope

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.-- Erich Fromm


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Issei Sagawa : Japan’s Celebrity Cannibal





The Sagawa Paradox:
Justice, Infamy, and the International Void

“I touch the cold body again and I wonder where I should start. I start to cut off all the meat before amputating the limbs. While I cut her calf I suddenly want to taste it. I see the beautiful red meat beneath the fat. I grasp her knee and her ankle, and tear it with my teeth. It is tender. I slowly chew and savor it.”

On the afternoon of June 13, 1981, a Japanese man named Issei Sagawa walked to the Bois de Boulogne, a park on the outskirts of Paris, carrying two suitcases. 
The contents of those suitcases, to the lament of a nearby jogger, was the dismembered body of a fellow student – a Dutch woman named Renée Hartevelt,whom Sagawa had shot three days prior and had spent the days since eating various parts of her.He was soon arrested. According to reports, Issei uttered, “I killed her to eat her flesh,” when they raided his home, whereupon they found bits of Renne still in his fridge.


What I’m saying is, I can’t bear the thought of leaving this life without ever tasting that derrière that I saw this morning, or her thighs,” he continued. “I want to eat them again while I’m alive, so that I can at least be satisfied when I die.





Sagawa was declared insane and unfit for trial and was institutionalized in Paris. 
His incarceration was to be short, however, as the French public soon grew weary of their hard-earned francs going to support this evil woman-eater, and Issei was promptly deported. Herein followed a bizarre and seemingly too convenient set of legal loopholes and psychiatric reports that led doctors in  Japan declaring him “sane, but evil.”
On August 12, 1986, Sagawa checked himself out of Tokyo’s Matsuzawa Psychiatric hospital.


The "French Loophole"

Sagawa's freedom was not an accident of one court, but a failure of coordination between two legal systems.





Confidentiality and Privacy Laws

When Sagawa was transferred to Japan, French authorities were legally barred from sharing his psychiatric evaluations and criminal case files. Citing privacy and procedural laws, France released him to Japan without the 'burden of proof' needed to sustain his detention.

Conflicting Medical Interpretations

French doctors deemed him insane and unfit for trial. Upon arrival in Japan, local psychologists found him 'sane but perverse.' Because he had no pending trial in Japan and was declared mentally fit by domestic standards, there was no legal basis to institutionalize him.


The Double Jeopardy Barrier

Because the French investigation was technically closed after the insanity finding, and he had 'served time' in a high-security hospital, Japanese courts faced a paradox: they could not retry a case that was considered closed by the original jurisdiction without new evidence—which was being withheld by France.






Issei Sagawa self portret

After his release, he became a minor celebrity in Japan and made a living through the public's interest in his crime.
He has authored at least 13 books, including explicit accounts of his own experiences. In one, he describes how the Dutch girl’s flesh “melted in [his] mouth like a perfect piece of tuna”. He has also written about other people’s atrocities, including a book about the infamous child-killer Sakakibara.He appeared in the 1992 film Sisenjiyou no Aria (The Bedroom), in which women are drugged and subjected to bizarre sexual fetishes. Sagawa’s role as a sadistic voyeur drew directly from his public persona.
Another example of art imitating life is in Sagawa’s own painting, which focuses on the nude bodies of Caucasian women.

In one extraordinary display of "bad taste", he was once hired by a tabloid to write restaurant reviews.




Literary Career

"In the Fog" (Kiri no Naka)

His detailed accounts of the crime became bestsellers, fueling a morbid public fascination.

Mainstream Integration

Media Appearances & Commercials

Beyond books, he appeared as a gourmet critic and in TV spots, blurring the line between criminal and entertainer.



The Cannibal that Walked Free (TV Movie 2007) - IMDb

Directed by Toby Dye. With Issei Sagawa. The Cannibal that Walked Free (also known as Cannibal Superstar ) is a British documentary 

produced by Visual Voodoo for Channel Five which explores - through direct access - the bizarre psychology and twisted celebrity fame that surrounds Japanese cannibal Issei Sagawa.

Issei Sagawa Paintings >>>




Crime scene photos of Issei Sagawa’s meal.


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