Have you ever packed your luggage so full that someone jokingly asks, “You got a body in there?” It’s a joke, or at least it’s supposed to be. After Issei Sagawa killed and ate his classmate, Renée Hartevelt, he loaded her remains into a suitcase, caught a taxi, and drove off to dispose of her body. Funny thing – the taxi driver asked if he had a body in there before driving him to a nearby park.
Who is Issei Sagawa, and what drove him to cannibalism?
Issei Sagawa was born on April 26, 1949 in Kobe, Hyōgo Prefecture. He came from a line of well-established men. His father, Akira Sagawa, was a wealthy businessman, who had served as president of Kurita Water Industries. His grandfather had been an editor for the Asahi Shimbun.
Issei had it rough from the very beginning. For starters, he was born months premature, and was so small, he could fit in the palm of his father’s hand. As if that wasn’t enough, he immediately developed a disease of the small intestine – enteritis. But he was strong, and after several injections of potassium and calcium, he managed to recover.
His hardships did not end there. First of all, he stood at only 4’9”. He described himself as “physically weak from the moment I was born. My legs were so skinny they looked like pencils.” Perhaps it’s because of his health and physical short-comings that led to his strong interest in literature.
As a child, he recalled playing games with his father and uncle, where his uncle would dress up as a monster and lower him and his brother into a stew pot for eating. He enjoyed stories that involved humans being eaten – such as Hansel and Gretel.
His first cannibalistic desires were experienced when he was in the first grade. “I saw the quivering meat on a male classmate’s thighs and I suddenly thought, ‘Mmm, that looks delicious.’” In an interview, he was quick to point out that the interest wasn’t sexual. In fact, by the time he entered junior high school, he had developed an obsession with Grace Kelly, an American actress known for her blonde hair, blue eyes, and feminine stature.
According to Issei, “I was short, ugly, and had an inferiority complex and therefore sought people who were the exact opposite of myself. Eventually, I began feeling a strong desire to bite into them – not to kill them or eat them per se, but merely to gnaw on their flesh.” For him, the desire to bite into people was sexual in nature.
“…you know how you tend to feel a stronger sexual desire when you’ve eaten a full meal” That’s when I would start feeling the urge to eat a girl.” His desire to bite eventually morphed into a desire to eat. To fend off that craving, he would make sure he ejaculated frequently. When he didn’t, the need only grew stronger.
“It’s simply a fetish,” he said. “For example, if a normal man fancied a girl, he’d naturally feel a desire to see her as often as possible, to be close to her, to smell her and kiss her, right? To me, eating is just an extension of that. Frankly, I can’t fathom why everyone doesn’t feel this urge to eat, to consume, other people.”
He briefly saw a psychiatrist for his urges when he was 15, but quit because he didn’t find it helpful.
He pursued a degree in English Literature, and earned his master’s degree at Kwansei Gakuin University. He studied literature at Wako University in Tokyo, and this is where things took a turn. When Issei found a tall German woman, he followed her home and broke into her apartment while she was sleeping. His plan was to slice off part of her buttocks and sneak away with his prize. Fortunately for her, and unfortunately for him, she woke up and pushed him to the ground.
He was caught and arrested by police, and charged with attempted rape. The charges were dropped, however, when his father stepped in and paid a settlement to the victim to make it go away.
When he was 27, in 1977, he moved to France to further pursue his education, this time a Ph.D. in literature. He attended the Sorbonne in Paris, and while living there, he reported that “Almost every night I would bring a prostitute home and then try to shoot them from behind while they washed their vaginas at the bidet. I tried hundreds of times, but for some reason my fingers froze up and I couldn’t pull the trigger.”
He claimed that all the French women he had met that were beautiful, were stuck-up and out of his league. Renée Hartevelt, however, was kind, friendly and warm. She was 25-years-old, 5’10” tall, and beautiful.
Issei Sagawa invited her to have a sukiyaki [hot pot] party at his home, at 10 Rue Erlanger. It wasn’t until he saw her washing her hands in the bathroom, that he realized he had to have her.
She went to his apartment a couple more times, under the guise of translating poetry for a school assignment. Each time, he stood behind her with the gun in his hand, but he was still unable to pull the trigger.
One day Issei went to a Japanese restaurant with an employee from his father’s company. He had a fever, which he believed may have made him delusional, because “the whole time I was thinking about how she was coming over the next day, and how if I got food poisoning from the raw fish that I ate there, I wouldn’t be able to finally realize the fantasy that I’d been obsessing about for 32 years.”
The next day, standing behind Renée, he finally pulled the trigger – but the gun misfired, making him hysterical, and further cementing the idea that he had to have her, but she was none the wiser. So, he invited her back two days later, on June 11, 1981.
Renée Hartevelt was reading poetry at a desk when Issei shot her in the neck with a rifle, then immediately fainted. When he awoke, she was dead. “The autopsy showed that the gun wasn’t powerful enough to send the bullet through her skull, so it just kept spinning round and round in her head. For a split second I thought about calling an ambulance, but then I thought, ‘Hang on, don’t be stupid. You’ve been dreaming about this for 32 years and now it’s actually happening!’”
He had sex with her body, and even felt regret at killing her. “… the moment the girl became a corpse, I realized that I had lost an important friend and even regretted killing her for a moment. What I truly wished was to eat her living flesh.” He went on to say that his intention was to eat her, not necessarily kill her.
He tried to bite into her skin, but his teeth were not sharp enough, so he had to go out and purchase a butcher knife. He cut into her buttock, but no matter how deep he cut, all he saw was the fat beneath the skin. “It looked like corn, and it took awhile to actually reach the red meat.” Once he reached meat, he tore it off with his fingers and ate it raw.
He continued to consume her raw, even reporting that he “ended up eating the clitoris and some pubes without chewing on it because she had her period then and the smell was just horrendous.” It was at that moment that he first felt sexual pleasure from eating her.
He reported that human meat is odorless, and the tastiest of all meats. “The meat on the soles of her feet smelled bad, though, and didn’t taste very nice. The neck was the best. The meat tastes more delicate as you move up the body, especially above the torso. Her tongue was delicious as well. I took it out of her mouth and chewed on it raw. He ate much of her raw, but then cut pieces and stored them in the refrigerator.
Throughout the process, he took several photos.
Then it came time to dispose of her body. She was starting to decompose, and had flies swarming around her. He had consumed or frozen most of her pelvic region, which left her legs, torso, and head – which he dismembered using a hatchet, then stuffed the smaller pieces into two suitcases and hailed a cab. The weight of the suitcases caused the taxi driver to jokingly ask him if he had a body in there.
Issei and his suitcases were dropped off at the Bois de Boulogne park, which had a secluded lake in it. His plan was to dump the suitcases in it. But when several people spotted him, struggling with the weight of the suitcases, he panicked and just left the suitcases.
After he left, to return home, the people who had witnessed his struggle with the suitcases became curious. A couple approached them, and spotted what appeared to be a human hand protruding from one of the bloodstained suitcases and immediately called the police.
It didn’t take police long to trace the suitcases back to Issei. Four days later, police turned up at his apartment. When they questioned him, he admitted, “I killed her to eat her flesh.”
Issei Sagawa sat in a French prison for two years. His father had hired him a lawyer for his defense, and in the end, he was found legally insane, and unfit to stand trial. Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière, ordered him held indefinitely in a mental institution.
As always, people are fascinated by the macabre, and this was no different. Author Inuhiko Yomota visited Issei and published his account in Japan under the title In the Fog. It is likely his increasing “celebrity” status was the catalyst behind the French authorities’ decision to deport him to Japan.
Back in Japan, Issei was committed to Matsuzawa Hospital in Tokyo. There, his examining psychologists declared him sane and found sexual perversion was his sole motivation for murder. But, since he had been deemed unfit to stand trial in France, the charges had been dropped and the court documents were subsequently sealed and not released to Japanese authorities. This meant he could not legally be detained in Japan.
On August 12, 1986, Issei Sagawa checked himself out of the hospital, and to this day remains a free man.
He has written books about the murder, as well as Shonen A, a book on the 1997 Kobe child murders. He wrote restaurant reviews for the Japanese magazine, Spa. But then publishers stopped seeking or publishing his writing, and he struggled to find employment.
He applied to a French language school, and was nearly accepted because the manager was so impressed by his courage in using his real name. But, employees protested, and he was subsequently rejected.
In 2005, his parents died, and he was prevented from attending their funeral. He did, however, repay all of their creditors. He moved into public housing and had no other choice but to survive off of welfare benefits. In an interview, he spoke of the difficulties in living in free society.
“Why on earth did I pull the trigger that day? That one small action changed everything. It made such a big impact on my life. The moment I killed her, I instinctually thought, “I’m no longer a human being.” I believe that it would have been much easier on me had I been given the death penalty. It’s so tough living out in the open. That’s reason enough for never committing the same crime ever again! You can’t imagine how difficult it is to live under surveillance from society. In that respect, I really believe that the death penalty just puts people out of their misery, and it totally defeats the purpose of punishment. The victim’s family always say things like, “I’ll never forgive so-and-so, even if they’re put to death,” despite the fact that it’s actually meant to be the harshest punishment. It’s so meaningless. Even with a life sentence, they give you clothes, food, and shelter in jail, plus they let you work. But if you’re out in society, you have to somehow make a living and find a place to stay. What harsher punishment can there be? It’s brutal.”
Today, Issei Sagawa lives quietly outside Tokyo. He is confined to a wheelchair and is looked after by his brother, Jun.
Looking for more cannibal content? Check out this story about Albert Fish, who had a taste for children.
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