Last month’s death of Issei Sagawa, dubbed the “Kobe Cannibal,” who ate a Dutch female student after he shot her to death in Paris in 1981 but was never jailed for the crime, has rekindled interest in the grisly case more than four decades on.
His death was covered more extensively by foreign media outlets than by domestic media, which mostly ran a brief obituary, showing the enduring shock value of the incident for Western countries.
Sagawa, who died of pneumonia on Nov. 24 at the age of 73, was a 32-year-old literature student in Paris when he met Renee Hartevelt, 25, a fellow student. In a 1983 book, he conveyed in detail how he plotted the murder, even unsuccessfully attempting to kill her two days before because of a rifle misfire.
On June 11, 1981, he invited Hartevelt to his home to study together, shot her from behind with the rifle, raped her and then ate her flesh. He then dismembered her body, stuffed the parts in a suitcase and disposed of them in the Bois de Boulogne park. When Sagawa was arrested on June 15, police found pieces of Hartevelt in a plastic bag in the refrigerator.
“Cannibalism is very much nourished by fetishistic desire,” Sagawa said in the 2017 documentary “Caniba.” “I think I’m crazy anyway because I ate Renee.”
French investigators visited Japan in 1982 to look into Sagawa’s past, and Japanese freelance journalist Shoko Yamaguchi, who was working as a reporter at Yukan Fuji, recalled how it was a major news item back then.
“Domestic media reporters were running around trying to find out where they were staying,” she said. “I tracked them down, got an exclusive interview and we were the first to run the photo of the victim.”
Talking to Japanese police and Sagawa’s family in Japan, the French investigators found that he had been arrested for trespassing and attempting to rape a 35-year-old German woman in Tokyo 10 years earlier, Yamaguchi said. But the victim didn’t press charges after Sagawa’s father, a wealthy businessman, paid a lump sum to settle the case.
In 1983, Sagawa was deemed unfit for trial by a French court, reportedly because his translator mistakenly said that he suffered from meningitis rather than peritonitis, a stomach disease. He was then deported to Japan, where he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital.
Doctors there, however, judged that he was fit for trial but had a personality disorder. Japanese investigators attempted to put him on trial in Japan, but they eventually gave up after French authorities turned down their request to share the investigation files, saying the case was closed.
Sagawa checked himself out of the hospital as a free man in 1985, triggering criticism that he was not being held criminally responsible, including from the Hartevelt family.
The Japan Times archives and other sources show how Sagawa capitalized on his experience by authoring “In the Fog” and a manga that gave gory details about the murder and cannibalism, and eventually he rose to fame as a late-night TV show commentator on serial murders in the late 1980s.
“It was during the bubble economy and TV stations would do anything to increase their viewership,” Yamaguchi said.
A Los Angeles Times story that ran in The Japan Times in July 1992 reported how Sagawa had become a “minor celebrity” in Japan.
“Sagawa has written four books. He is the author of a weekly column in a widely circulated tabloid and appears on television. He has shown up in compromising poses in pornographic magazines,” the report said.
“The public has made me the godfather of cannibalism and I am happy about that,” Sagawa was quoted as saying in the report.
Adding to Sagawa's fame, Japanese novelist Juro Kara wrote a book based on letters he received from the killer, and it was awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Award in 1983.
But Sagawa’s time in the spotlight was over by the turn of the millennium, with his lavish lifestyle having depleted his finances.
He was left half bed-ridden after a stroke in 2013. His brother subsequently took care of him at home.
Even in his twilight years, however, he attracted attention from foreign media. In 2010, Vice interviewed Sagawa, in which he recounted the murder once again. But the outlet also expressed ambivalence about the media's role in it all.
"Sagawa's punishment, he believes, is the very thing that has supported him — his fame and the irony is not lost on him. Personally, I feel that this torment has not been punishment enough," the Vice journalist wrote.
"Furthermore, I feel that perhaps the blame is just as much upon us, the public," they wrote. "We have been encouraging this strange man to exist in order to feed our macabre fascinations, and the irony of that is not lost on me."
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