Authors: Daniel Diehl
If Issei’s quest left him unfulfilled, so did his social life at the Sorbonne. The tiny, frail oriental foreigner was almost completely ignored by his fellow students, so he was forced, once again, to retreat into a fantasy world to make friends. The newest object of his rapt attention was a 25-year-old fellow student named Renée Hartevelt. The extremely bright, Dutch beauty was everything Issei had ever dreamed about. ‘I am amazed. She’s the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.
Tall, blonde, with pure white skin, she astonishes me with her grace.’ Being outgoing and kind-hearted by nature, Renée took pity on the lonely little man who sat near her in a class. Occasionally she would take time out to talk to him, sometimes in English, sometimes in French and, occasionally, he would try out his limited German on her. They talked about everything from Shakespeare to French Impressionist paintings. They even went to art exhibitions, museums and concerts together and, on at least one occasion, she invited him to her flat for tea. If Renée felt a sad sort of affection for Issei, he was completely fixated on her and devised a plan that would allow him to bring his morbid fantasy to fruition.
Issei told Renée he wanted to hire her to tutor him in German; since his father was rich he could easily afford to pay her for her time. Like most students, Renée needed the extra money and she rather liked Issei, so she accepted. To celebrate their new arrangement, Issei invited her to his apartment for a traditional Japanese dinner.
‘After the meal I asked her to read my favourite German Expressionist poem. As she reads I can’t keep my eyes off her. After she leaves I can still smell her body on the bed sheet where she sat reading the poem. I lick the chopsticks and dishes she used. I can taste her lips. My passion is so great. I want to eat her. If I do, she will be mine forever.’
The next day, 11 June 1981, Issei asked Renée to come back and reread the same piece of Schiller’s poetry, explaining that he wanted to tape it for one of his teachers back in Japan. She said she had no particular plans for the evening and that she would see him later.
When she arrived at Issei’s rooms, he seated her on the floor, Japanese style, and brought her a cup of tea liberally laced with whisky in the hope that it would dull her senses. They chatted amiably for a while until Issei was able to bring the conversation around to his real feelings for her. He told Renée he loved her
and wanted to have sex with her. Embarrassed, Renée explained that while she really liked him, her feelings were purely platonic. She didn’t want to lose him as a friend, but she really did not want to sleep with him. Resignedly, Issei shrugged his shoulders and said he understood. Then, changing the subject in an attempt to dispel the awkward silence, he suggested she read the poem again. Relieved, she was quick to agree. What happened next is best told in Sagawa’s own words. He later recounted the entire incident in his semi-novelised autobiography
In the Fog
and has described the event innumerable times. Like everything else that has taken place in Sagawa’s life since the incident, the book was an attempt to relive, and savour, the nightmarish events that followed.
I turn on the recorder. She starts to read. She speaks in perfect German. I reach for the rifle hidden beside the chest of drawers. I stand slowly and aim the rifle at the back of her head. I cannot stop myself.
I aim and I fire. There is a loud sound and her body falls from the chair on to the floor. It is like she is watching me. I see her cheeks, her eyes, her nose and mouth, the blood pouring from her head. Too much blood, her face all completely pale. I try to talk to her, but she no longer answers.
Later, Sagawa would comment that he was amazed at how quiet Renée became after he murdered her.
I thought I would have to call the police or the ambulance, really, but suddenly I realized [that] for my fantasy I [had] killed her.
There is blood all over the floor. I try to wipe it up, but I realize I cannot stop the flow of blood from her head. It is very quiet here. There is only the silence of death. I start
to take off her clothes. It is hard to take the clothes off a dead body. Finally it is done. Her beautiful white body is before me. I’ve waited so long for this day and now it is here. I touch her ass. It is so very smooth. I wonder where I should bite first. I decide to bite the top of her butt. My nose is covered with her cold white skin. I try to bite down hard, but I can’t. I get a knife from the kitchen and stab it deeply into her skin.
Suddenly a lot of sallow fat oozes from the wound. It continues to ooze. Finally I find the red meat under the sallow fat. I scoop it out and put it in my mouth. I chew. It has no smell and no taste. It melts in my mouth like a perfect piece of raw tuna in a sushi restaurant. I look in her eyes and say: ‘You are delicious.’
I cut her body and lift the meat to my mouth again and again. Then I take a photograph of her white corpse with its deep wounds. I have sex with her body. When I hug her she lets out a breath. I’m frightened, she seems alive. I kiss her and tell her I love her. Then I drag her body to the bathroom. By now I am exhausted, but I cut into her hip and put the meat in a roasting pan. After it is cooked I sit at the table using her underwear as a napkin. They still smell of her body.
Then I turn on the tape of her reading the German poem and eat. There is not enough taste. I use some salt and some mustard and it is delicious, very high quality meat. Then I go back to the bathroom and cut off her breast and bake it. It swells while it cooks. I serve the breast on the table and eat it with a fork and knife. It isn’t very good. Too greasy. I try to cut into another part of her body. Her thighs were wonderful. Finally she is in my stomach. Finally she is mine. Finally, I was eating a beautiful white woman and thought nothing was so delicious. It is the best dinner I’ve ever had.
Afterwards I sleep with her.
Next morning she is still here. She doesn’t smell bad. Today I must finish cutting up her body.
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 savour it.
After eating most of the calf I look at myself in the mirror. There is grease all over my face. And then I start to eat at random. I bite her little toe. It still smells of her feet. I stab the knife into her arch and see the red meat deep inside. I thrust my fingers inside and dig out the meat and put it in my mouth. It tastes okay. Then I stab the knife into her armpit. Ever since I saw [her armpit] under her yellow sleeveless top I wondered how it would taste. I had no idea it would taste this good. The wonderful taste cheers me up and I devour her underarm up to the elbow.
Finally I cut off her private parts. When I touch the pubic hair it has a very bad smell. I bite her clit, but it won’t come off, it just stretches. So I throw it in the frying pan and pop it in my mouth. I chew very carefully and swallow it. It is so sweet. After I swallow it, I feel her in my body and get hot. I turn the body over and open her buttocks, revealing her anus. I scoop it out with my knife and try to put it in my mouth. It smells too much. I put it in the frying pan and throw it in my mouth. It still smells. I spit it out.
It’s been twenty-four hours now. Some huge flies hover and buzz in the bathroom. I try to chase them away, but they come back. They swarm on her face. They seem to tell me that I’ve lost her forever. It is no longer her. Where is she? She’s gone far away. I try to use an electric knife to
cut her body. It doesn’t work. It just makes a loud sound. I use a hatchet. I strike several times. It’s hard work. I strike her thigh. Her body jumps up. If she could feel, it would have hurt. Finally the thigh separates from her body. I bite it again, like I would bite a chicken leg. Then I cut off her arms. It is even harder than the thigh. I use the electric knife again. It makes a shrill sound, like the sound of her shrill voice. It works this time. Her hand still wears a ring and a bracelet. When I see her long fingers I am driven by another impulse. I use her hand to masturbate. Her long fingers excite me.
And then I see her face. It is still quiet. She has a small nose and a sweet lower lip. When she was alive I wanted to bite them. Now I can satisfy that desire. It’s so easy to bite off her nose. As I chew the cartilage I can hear the noise. I use a knife to cut off more of the cartilage and put it in my mouth. It really doesn’t taste very good. I scoop out her lower lip with my knife and put it in my mouth. It has hard skin. I decide to eat it later when I can fry it. So I put it in the refrigerator.
I want her tongue. I can’t open her lower jaw, but I can reach in between her teeth. Finally it comes out. I cut it off and put it in my mouth. It’s hard to chew. I see my face in the mirror. Her tongue entwined with my tongue. I try to close my mouth, but her tongue slips out. Finally I cut the skin off the tongue and taste the meat.
I try to eat her eyes. It’s hard for me to stab into them, though it is the easiest part of her face. I can see tears coming from them. It frightens me. Her eyes are all that is left of her face. It is nearly a skull.
At last I have to cut off her head. It is the most difficult thing I have to do. I cut off the meat on her neck until I can see bone . . . I use the hatchet. It is surprisingly easy to cut through. With the head gone her body is
now only flesh. When I grab the hair and hang up the head, I realize I am a cannibal. I put the head in a plastic bag.
[I] open the refrigerator. I recognize each piece of meat. This is part of her hip and this is part of her thigh. I fry them on the stove. I set the table. There is mustard, salt, pepper and sauce. I put her underwear beside the dish. I sniff it and look at a nude woman in a magazine. I try to remember which part of her is in my mouth, but it is difficult to connect the meat with a body. Each day the meat becomes more tender, each day the taste is more sweet and delicious.
At some point during this unspeakable chain of events, one of Sagawa’s neighbours remembered hearing him howling and banging on the walls of his apartment.
By 15 June, four days after the murder, Sagawa realised that he would have to dispose of the rapidly putrefying carcass of Renée Hartevelt. Before stuffing the butchered remains into garbage bags, he went out and bought two immense, wheeled suitcases, lugged them home and proceeded to fill them with Renée’s body parts. He then called a taxi, heaved the bags into the boot with the driver’s help, and told the cabbie to take him to the lakes in the Bois de Boulogne park. The sight of this tiny, limping Oriental man lugging two huge suitcases over the vast expanse of lawn inevitably drew the curious stares and excited chatter of people in the park. Suddenly confused and terrified, Sagawa abandoned his burden and bolted for home, leaving the bags and their grotesque contents behind. Predictably the police were summoned and the suitcases opened. It only took two days for detectives to learn where the suitcases had come from and who had purchased them.
When the gendarmes arrived at Sagawa’s flat, he made no attempt to flee. As they carried out a search that turned up
various parts of Renée in the refrigerator, he went into great detail explaining exactly what he had done, why he had done it and the fact that he had once been to see a psychiatrist in Japan for his little problem. Shortly thereafter, the police hustled him off to the Henri Colin psychiatric ward in Villejuif where a team of three doctors tried to determine whether he was sane enough to stand trial for murder. They all agreed. Issei Sagawa was ‘untreatably psychotic’, legally incompetent and it was unlikely that he could ever be cured. By the time the trial came up in 1983, the presiding judge had no choice but to declare that Issei Sagawa was in a ‘state of dementia’ at the time of the crime and therefore unable to stand trial. Because it was unlikely that he could ever be cured, he would be committed to the Paul Guiraud Asylum in Paris where he would be detained for an indefinite period of time. It was the judges’ intent that Sagawa be incarcerated for the remainder of his life, but somehow things did not quite work out that way.
After three years spent chatting with the doctors and corresponding with the seamier members of Japanese intelligentsia – who sent him a stream of books on cannibals and cannibalism – Sagawa came to a startling conclusion. ‘I realized I was not so unusual.’ Unusual or not, Akira Sagawa had no intention of allowing his little boy to rot in a French asylum, so he began making discreet enquiries as to how much it would cost to have him repatriated to Japan. The French authorities had no desire to feed and house Issei Sagawa for the next half-century or so, so they agreed to a deal. They would allow Issei to be flown back to Japan on condition that he be permanently institutionalised there. In May 1984, Issei was on his way back home where he was to be comfortably ensconced in the Matsuzawa Psychiatric Hospital in Tokyo.
Once at the hospital, two things seemed to happen simultaneously. First, he became the object of constant attention by a salacious Japanese press and, secondly, the doctors decided
he was sane after all. Hospital superintendent Tsuguo Kanego went so far as to say, ‘I think he is sane and guilty . . . he should be in prison.’ Evidently, the Japanese police agreed and requested French authorities to hand over the evidence and legal transcripts that would allow them to build a case against Sagawa. The French adamantly refused to cooperate. If Sagawa was declared sane and allowed to stand trial, it would make the French psychiatric and legal system look incompetent – this they could not tolerate. Reluctantly but, it would seem, under intense pressure from Sagawa’s father and his money, in September 1985, Issei Sagawa was released from the hospital.