While a student in Paris, the man murdered and ate a Dutch student in 1981.
The “Japanese cannibal” died at the age of 73. In 1981, Issei Sagawa murdered and ate a Dutch student in Paris. His crime inspired horror and fascination around the world.
Issei Sagawa died on November 24 of pneumonia, and a funeral has already taken place in the presence of his relatives only, according to a statement sent by the publisher of an autobiography of his brother Jun published in 2019. No public ceremony n was planned, the statement added.
Student in Paris
Issei Sagawa was a student in Paris at the University of the Sorbonne when, on June 11, 1981, he invited a Dutch comrade, Renée Hartevelt, to dinner in his apartment. There, he had killed her with a rifle shot in the neck and raped her before cutting her up and eating different parts of her body for three days.
“Eating that girl was an expression of love. I wanted to feel in me the existence of a person I love“, he had confessed after his arrest. Experts attesting to his mental illness, he had benefited from a dismissal and had been interned in France then in Japan before recovering freedom in August 1985.
Having become a media star, he received many journalists in his apartment in the suburbs of Tokyo. He sometimes appeared on Japanese television and had published several bestsellers such as Cannibal Where I would like to be eaten and drew a manga recounting his crime.
Japanese writer Juro Kara won the prestigious Akutagawa literary prize in 1982 for his novel Sagawa’s letter, devoted to the crime of Issei Sagawa. Two anthropologists also made a documentary about him in 2018, titled Canibain which Issei Sagawa asserted that he was unable toexplainhis act. “It’s just my fantasy. I can’t say anything more specific“, he said in the film. “People must think I’m crazy.He was describing hisobsession” as “impossible to contain“, stating:”I wanted to eat ass more than anything“.
The directors of the documentary, Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, said they were “crossedby a crowd ofextremely conflicted feelings» over the months spent in the intimacy of Issei Sagawa and his brother Jun, a follower of self-harm. “We were disgusted, fascinated, we wanted to understand…“, specified Verena Paravel, adding that it was despite everything a “film about fraternity, about love“.
SEE ALSO – Several arrests in Corsica by the anti-terrorist sub-directorate