The Kobe cannibal who got away.

Still in the shadow of the Second World War, a baby has been born vastly premature in the port city of Kobe. His name is Issei Sagawa. He’s so small in fact, that he fits in his father’s hand. He develops enteritis, but injections of potassium and calcium spare him. Despite that, his health remains fragile in childhood, leading him to become introverted.

In first grade, after seeing a man’s thigh, he experiences his first cannibalistic impulse.

At the age of 24, Sagawa’s early health issues are reflected in his abnormally short stature, standing at just 4′9. He’s moved to Tokyo to study at Wako University and one night whilst out, he spots a tall German woman. He follows her through the clean streets, passing the variably coloured neon signs that line them until she arrives at her apartment. When she’s sleeping, he breaks in and creeps up to her bed, pulling out a knife. Before he can do anything though, she awakes and pushes him over. The police are called and he’s arrested, but the matter is eventually settled by Sagawa’s wealthy father, who pays her off.

Whilst he told the police that he was going to rape her, what he actually intended to do was slice off part of her buttocks and then sneak away to feast on the stolen flesh.

His brush with the law didn’t dissuade him though, and when he moved to Paris to pursue a PhD in 1977, he settled into an unsettling routine:

"Almost every night I would bring a prostitute home and then try to shoot them, but for some reason my fingers froze up and I couldn't pull the trigger."

A few years into his course, he invites one of his classmates back to his apartment on dinner, under the pretence of translating poetry for a class assignment. The classmate in question is a 25 year old Dutch woman, attractive and tall, standing at 5′10. When she arrived, she sat down at his desk and began reciting poetry.

As she did, he put a rifle to the back of her neck and shot her.

After waking up from fainting and in the hope of absorbing her energy and beauty, he began a depraved ritual. He first had sex with her corpse and then tried to bite into her flesh, only to find his teeth weren’t sharp enough to penetrate her skin. So after going out and purchasing a butcher’s knife, he returned and started hacking up her body, eating most of her breasts and face raw and cooked, whilst storing the rest in his fridge. He attempted to dump the rest in a lake, but was caught by the police and arrested a few days later.

If you think it’s crazy so far, it only gets madder.

After being held for two years, awaiting trial, he was declared legally insane and consequently unfit to stand trial. Initially he was held in a French mental institution, but the fame he accrued led the authorities to deport him back to Japan, where he was immediately committed to a mental hospital in Tokyo. There, his examining psychologists declared him sane, finding sexual perversion as his sole motivation.

As the French charges had been dropped and the documents sealed away, they were unavailable to the Japanese authorities and as a consequence, they could not legally detain him. He discharged himself in 1986, and has been free ever since. In the decade following, he has appeared in a film as a sado-sexual voyeur, wrote restaurant reviews for a magazine and been a regular guest speaker and interviewee. Continue reading

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