Sagawa in Paris
Sagawa the Restaurant Critic (no, honestly - he is!)
The victim - Renée Hartevelt
_________________________________________________
Issei Sagawa (佐川 一政, Sagawa Issei?, born April 26, 1949 is a Japanese man who in 1981 murdered and cannibalized a Dutch woman named Renée Hartevelt in Paris. After his release, he became a minor celebrity in Japan and made a living through the public's interest in his crime.
Early life
Sagawa was born in Kobe, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan, to wealthy parents. He was born prematurely, reportedly small enough to fit in the palm of his father's hand, and was immediately afflicted with enteritis, a disease of the small intestine. He eventually recovered, after several saline injections of potassium and calcium.
In 1977, at the age of 28, Sagawa emigrated to France to pursue a Ph.D. in literature at the Sorbonne Academy in Paris.
Crimes
Murder of Hartevelt
Sagawa served time in French prison for the murder of Dutch student Renée Hartevelt, a classmate of Sagawa's at the Sorbonne. On June 11, 1981, Sagawa, then 32, invited Hartevelt to dinner at his 10 Rue Erlanger apartment under the pretext of translating German poetry for a class he was taking. Upon her arrival, after convincing her to begin reading the poetry, he shot her in the neck with a rifle while she sat with her back to him at a desk. At that point he began to carry out his plan to eat her. His first attempt to bite into her buttocks met with failure so he went out to buy a butcher knife. Sagawa has stated he chose Hartevelt for her health and beauty, characteristics Sagawa believed he lacked. Sagawa describes himself as a "weak, ugly, and inadequate little man" (he is just under 5 ft (1.52 m) tall) and claims that he wanted to "absorb her energy".
Sagawa said he fainted after the shock of shooting her, but awoke with the realization that he had to carry out his plan. He did so, beginning with her buttocks and thighs, 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 the body. He described the meat as tasting like raw tuna. He then attempted to dump the mutilated body in a remote lake, but was seen in the act and later arrested by French police, who found parts of the deceased still in his refrigerator.
Sagawa's wealthy father provided a lawyer for his defense, and after being held for two years without trial Sagawa was found legally insane and unfit to stand trial by the French judge Jean-Louis Bruguière, who ordered him held indefinitely in a mental institution. After a visit by the author Inuhiko Yomota, Sagawa's account of the murder was published in Japan under the title In the Fog. Sagawa's subsequent publicity and macabre celebrity likely contributed to the French authorities' decision to have him extradited to Japan. Upon arrival in Japan, he was immediately taken to Matsuzawa hospital, where examining psychologists all found him to be sane, stating that sexual perversion was the sole motivation for the murder.Japanese authorities found it legally impossible to detain him because the French government refused to release court documents (which remain secret) to Japan, claiming that the case had already been dropped in France. As a result, Sagawa checked himself out of the mental institution on August 12, 1986, and has been a free man ever since. Sagawa's freedom has been questioned and criticized by many.
Post-release
Sagawa now lives in Tokyo and is a minor celebrity in Japan. He was often invited as a guest speaker and commentator between 1986 and 1997. He has also written restaurant reviews for the Japanese magazine Spa. In 1992, he appeared in Hisayasu Sato's exploitation film Uwakizuma: Chijokuzeme (Unfaithful Wife: Shameful Torture) as a sadosexual voyeur.
Along with books about the murder he committed, Sagawa has written Shonen A, a book on the Kobe child murders of 1997, in which a 14-year-old the media called "Seito Sakakibara" and "Boy A" ("Shōnen A") killed and decapitated a child and attacked several others.
Despite this early freelance work, Sagawa can no longer find publishers for his writing and has been rejected from over 500 different places of employment. Each job application requires writing his résumé out in longhand. He was nearly accepted by a French-language school because the manager was impressed by his courage in using his real name, but employees protested and he was rejected. In 2005, Sagawa's parents died. He was prevented from attending their funeral, but he repaid their creditors and moved into public housing. He received welfare for some time but no longer does.In an interview with Vice magazine in 2009, he expressed suicidal thoughts and said that being forced to make a living while being known as a murderer and cannibal was a terrible punishment.
In popular culture
A 1986 short film by Olivier Smolders called Adoration is based on Sagawa's story. In the same year, the TV channel Viasat Explorer released a 47-minute documentary film called Cannibal Superstar. In 2010, VBS.tv did a short documentary about him, titled VBS Meets: Issei Sagawa.
The noise/drone metal band Gnaw Their Tongues produced an EP in 2007 titled Issei Sagawa with tracks based on his crime.
Too Much Blood, a song on the Undercover album by The Rolling Stones, is about Sagawa.
Sagawa's story inspired the 1981 Stranglers song "La Folie".
__________________________________________________
'Paris Cannibal' Sagawa still hungers for attention "I invited her to join me for some Japanese food. But Japanese restaurants [in Paris] were expensive, so I said I'd prepare sukiyaki at home. No one else came along, and usually a girl would be on her guard to be alone with a man at his place, but Renee was completely at ease.
"The sukiyaki got burnt and stuck to the pot, and while she stood at the sink washing it, I got this feeling while looking at her from behind --- I don't know why --- that she looked like a whore, and I was overcome with this compulsion to eat her."
So he did. With a completely detached mien, as if he were talking about another person, Issei Sagawa conveys to writer-photographer Noboru Hashimoto in Jitsuwa Knuckles (October) the details of the 1981 crime that got him enshrined in the Hall of Gustatory Infamy along with Dr. Hannibal Lecter.
His victim was 25-year-old Renee Hartevelt, a literature student from the Netherlands of Jewish background, who was, like Sagawa, enrolled at the Sorbonne. The murder weapon was a small-caliber rifle fired at the back of her head from close range. After having sex with her corpse, he then carved up portions of her body and ate them. He described the taste of the raw flesh as resembling "tuna sashimi." Other parts were stored in the refrigerator and cooked after garnishing with salt and pepper. And sorry, but any further descriptions of this creepy cook's macabre meal will have to be entrusted to another translator, folks. In fact, I'm shutting down until the urge to regurgitate subsides.
[Okay, I'm back.]
By his own account, Sagawa loaded the unconsumed remains of Hartevelt's corpse into two suitcases and transported them into a park. While discarding the evidence of his grisly crime in the shrubbery, he was spotted by an amorous couple, who informed the police, describing the perpetrator an Asian, standing 160cm tall and almost emaciated in appearance (Sagawa weighed just 35 kilograms at the time.) He was tracked down and arrested soon thereafter.
Found not guilty by reason of insanity, he was confined to a mental hospital but expelled from France and allowed to return to Japan after a year.
While members of the public reacted to Sagawa's antics with a kind of morbid curiosity, the reaction by some of those who encountered him personally was more visceral. They found him not only dislikable, but loathsome to the extreme.
To get out of the job, one cameraman ordered by a weekly photo magazine to cover Sagawa was even said to have feigned alcoholism and hospitalized.
More than 10 books were published about him. One was an autobiographical, self-illustrated account of his crime. Another was a compendium of letters between the hospitalized Sagawa and a famous dramatist that was awarded the prestigious Akutagawa literary prize. This, Hashimoto writes, helped to solidify Sagawa's identity as an eater of human flesh, while at the same time encouraging him to engage in buffoonery.
And engage he did. After his discharge from a Tokyo hospital, Sagawa subsequently worked at earning a well-deserved reputation as Japan's "celebrity cannibal," with an appearance in an adult video, as a guest on TV talk shows and in the print media.
"His sole claim to fame," Hashimoto tells Jitsuwa Knuckles readers, "was one that no one else could make: that he had eaten another human being."
Sagawa currently lives on an inheritance from his father and his writings. Most Japanese media avoid him now, but he still earns stipends from foreign camera crews that come to Japan to request him to appear in tabloid-style documentaries.
A photo in Jitsuwa Knuckles shows the bespectacled Sagawa standing outside a store window, admiring the legs of a female mannequin.
"When I see a beautiful girl while riding the train, I feel like eating her," he confesses.
There's no explaining the madness --- the cowardice and desires --- that drove him to cannibalism. His twisted sexual urges toward women. It is here, Hashimoto writes, where Issei Sagawa's sole existence is to be found. (By Masuo Kamiyama, contributing writer)
（Mainichi Japan） October 2, 2007
__________________________________________________
Interview with a Cannibal :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BosZxa1bYcE
Pages: 1 2
Will the Aussie/NZ tour celebrate the 31st anniversary of UNDERCOVER?? (Read 8,481 times)
