The year 1981 runs and on the afternoon of June 13 a man of oriental traits Walk through the Boulogne forest, around Paris. It carries two synthetic leather suitcases, deformed by the weight.
Police arrive minutes later. They stop it right there, without resistance. Inside the suitcases they find The dismembered remains of a young woman: a partially wrapped head, amputated members, viscera rolled in cooking paper.
The suspect is called Issei Sagawa, is 32 years old and is a student of comparative literature in the sorbonne.
In the suitcase they are the remains of Renée Hartevelta 25 -year -old Dutch classmate.
The agents also find a Polaroid chamber with images that explain what happened: Renée naked, on their backs, then lying on the floor, also without a head, finally, without legs, then open. In one of the photos, a piece of meat appears in a pan. In another, Sagowa smiles.
Police do not need to interrogate it much: He begins to tell his story. “I did it because I loved her. I wanted to keep it inside me,” he says.
The shadow man
Issei Sagawa was born on April 26, 1949 in Kōbe, Japan. He arrives in the world two months before time. Survive an enteritis that puts it between life and death for weeks. That start marks it.
Since then, Sagawa conceives himself as an incomplete beingan “insect”, as is called again and again in their memoirs. A body as weak as it is overwhelmed that it is not enough to live fully.
At six years old, something that, later it will remember clearly. While watching a classmate’s legs, Feel an inexplicable impulse: he wants to bite him. “It was something erotic,” he will write decades later.
At home, nothing is missing. His father, Akira Sagawa, is President of an important water company. His grandfather, editor of the popular newspaper Asahi Shimbun.
The young Issei grows surrounded by culture, art, prestige. Learn several languages, take refuge in books. Read Lautréamont, Baudelaire, Tanizaki. Admire Western actressesdraw them, cut their faces and keep them.
In adolescence the metro forty -five high exceeds. He says feeling a shadow. Women ignore it. At 24, he studies English literature at the University of Wako. One night, follow a German woman to her apartment. Plan to enter while she sleeps, cut a small portion of meat from the buttocks and take it home. But it fails. He is arrested, and accused of attempted rape. His father pays strong compensation and manages to silence the case.
In 1977, Issei Sagawa moves to Paris. It arrives with a Japanese government scholarship. It is installed in a small department of the Ruelanger. Live alone. Take refuge in readingbut his inner world enters gloom.
At night, Sagawa begins to invite prostitutes to his department with the excuse of practicing French. But what they cannot anticipate is that they are being converted into subjects of experimentation for the private trials of the young cannibalism.
Your study and action method It’s disturbing: open the closet, get a firearm, point … and not shoot. In that gesture contained, he will recognize later, what he feels is not mercy on women, but panic before his own cowardice.
The one Sagawa made after being deported to his native country: he filmed a porn film and was even a gastronomic critic.
Everything changes in the spring of 1981, when he meets Renée. She embodies everything he admires and wants: High, blonde, safe, cultured. He is 25 years old, he studies German literature, it’s the piano, he speaks several languages.
Issei falls in love, but his way of loving is a radical distortion: “I did not want to possess her as a lover, I wanted his energy to melt with mine. Eating it was the only way to abandon me. ”
Sagawa enters shock: it faints for a few minutes. Upon waking, he approaches the body. Caresses it. He kisses him. Viola. Try to devour it, but soon frustrates: His teeth fail to cross the skin. The next day, he goes to buy a butcher knife.
For three days, Sagowa lives among Renée’s remains. Eat the buttocks, part of the thighs, face, neck. Keep the clitoris and lips on a tray, as if they were chocolates. Save some pieces in the refrigerator, others in the Freezer. “It was like touching God,” he will say later. When the rest of the body begins to break down, decides to get rid of what remains and that is when it is caught.
It remains in preventive detention two years, while the trial is prepared. The press baptizes him as “The Cannibal Japanese”Its history appears in newspapers around the world. The journalist and writer Inuhiko Yomota visits him in jail. Fascinated by the way Sagowa articulates his crime as an aesthetic experience, he proposes to publish his testimony.
From that encounter the book is born In the fogin which the cannibal describes the murder as a “poetic action”, A kind of symbiotic act that allowed him to overcome his inferiority complex and feel, finally, complete.
Impose
The trial never happens. In June 1983, the judge declared Sagowa Insan. He considers that he is not a criminal responsible for his actions and orders his hospitalization at the Psychiatric Hospital for an indefinite time. The decision causes outragebut the true shock will come shortly after: in 1984, under diplomatic and media pressure, France deportes Sagawa to his country of origin.
Upon arriving in Tokyo, a group of psychiatrists evaluates it. Unlike their French peers, they conclude that the crime was promoted by conscious sexual deviation. However, because the case documents are sealed in France, since In Japan he was never formally triedThey cannot process it.
In 1986, Sagawa is released. That same week, Walk through the streets of Tokyo. It appears on television programs, offers interviews, publishes articles. It becomes a media.
In 1992, he acts in a pornographic film entitled Unfaithful Wife: Shameful Torture. In a disturbing scene, shows the actress photos of Renée’s body While they have sex.
Also Write a book about the murder of a child committed by another childand even gastronomic criticism for the magazine Spa. Television shows it by eating raw meat with sticks.
On November 24, 2022, Issei Sagawa dies alone, sick, at 73, for pneumonia. No one claims his body. There is no ceremony, nor duel, nor tears, nor name in a grave.
From their passage through the earth there were just a few notebooks. In one of them, someone found an underlined phrase, taken from Baudelaire: “Evil is made without effort, by fatality; good is always the product of an art”.
Who knows if in that line did not find existential justification? Or, rather, his conviction. That one that decides How to wish to be another (Do not love it, not possess it, but be) is the most desperate gesture, the most unattainable, the most disturbing of all.
