Issei Sagawa also known as “Pang” or “The Kobe Cannibal”, was a Japanese lust murderer, cannibal, and necrophiliac

Issei Sagawa was born on 26 April 1949 in Kobe, Hyōgo Prefecture, to wealthy parents. Sagawa’s father, Akira Sagawa, was a businessman who had served as president of Kurita Water Industries, and his grandfather had been an editor for The Asahi Shimbun. Sagawa was born prematurely and, reportedly, was small enough that he could fit in the palm of his father’s hand. He immediately developed enteritis, a disease of the small intestine. Sagawa eventually recovered after several injections of potassium and calcium in saline.

Sagawa’s fragile health and introverted personality led to him developing a strong interest in literature. Sagawa first experienced cannibalistic desires while in the first grade, after seeing a male’s thigh. He also remembered with fondness his uncle dressing up as a monster and lowering him and his brother into a stew pot for eating. He sought out fairy tales that involved humans being eaten, and his favorite was “Hansel and Gretel”. In a 2011 interview with Vice, Sagawa reported that, as a youth, he committed bestiality on his dog and experienced cannibalistic desires for women. Sagawa attended Wako University and completed a master’s degree in English Literature at Kwansei Gakuin University.

At the age of 24, while attending Wako University in Tokyo, Sagawa followed a tall German woman home, then broke into her apartment while she was sleeping. Sagawa’s intention was to cannibalize her by slicing off part of her buttocks and sneaking away with a small part of her flesh, but she awoke and, according to Sagawa, thwarted his attack and pushed him to the ground. Sagawa was captured by police and charged with attempted rape, and did not confess his true intentions to authorities. Sagawa’s charges of attempted rape were dropped when his father paid a settlement to the victim.

In 1977, at the age of 28, Sagawa moved to France to pursue a Ph.D. in literature at the Sorbonne in Paris. Sagawa has said that while residing in Paris, “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.” “It became less about wanting to eat them, but more an obsession with the idea that I simply had to carry out this ‘ritual’ of killing a girl no matter what.” Although Sagawa did once attempt to see a psychiatrist for his urges at age 15, he found it unhelpful and retreated further into his isolated psyche. Then, in 1981, after repressing his desires for 32 years, he finally acted on them.

On 12 June 1981, Sagawa, invited his Sorbonne classmate Renée Hartevelt (Over time, Sagawa struck up a friendship with her, occasionally inviting her to his home for dinner. At some point, he gained her trust.), a Dutch woman, to dinner at his apartment at 10 Rue Erlanger, under the pretext of translating poetry for a school assignment. Sagawa planned to kill and eat her, having selected her for her health and beauty, characteristics he felt he lacked. Sagawa considered himself weak, ugly, and small (he was 145 cm (4 ft 9 in) tall and claimed he wanted to absorb her energy. She was 25 years old and 178 cm (5 ft 10 in).

After Hartevelt arrived, she began reading poetry at a desk with her back to Sagawa when he shot her in the neck with a rifle. Sagawa said he fainted after the shock of shooting her, but awoke with the realization that he had to carry out his plan.He had attempted to kill her once, unsuccessfully, before actually murdering her. The first time the gun misfired when her back was turned. Though most would take this as a sign to give up, it only pushed Sagawa further down his rabbit hole. “[It] made me even more hysterical and I knew that I simply had to kill her,” he said. Sagawa only felt a moment of remorse before he became elated. “I thought about calling an ambulance,” he recalled. “But then I thought, ‘Hang on, don’t be stupid. You’ve been dreaming about this for 32 years and now it’s actually happening!'”

Immediately after killing her, he raped her corpse but he could not bite into her skin because his teeth were not sharp enough, so he left the apartment and purchased a butcher knife and began cutting her open. “The first thing I did was cut into her buttock. No matter how deep I cut, all I saw was the fat beneath the skin. It looked like corn, and it took a while to actually reach the red meat,” Sagawa recalled. “The moment I saw the meat, I tore a chunk off with my fingers and threw it into my mouth. It was truly a historical moment for me.” Sagawa consumed various parts of Hartevelt’s body, eating most of her breasts, face, buttocks, feet, thighs, and neck, either raw or cooked (even admitting that he swallowed her clitoris whole, due to her being on her period at the time, and him not liking the smell of menstrual blood), while saving other parts in his refrigerator. Sagawa also took photographs of Hartevelt’s body at each eating stage. Ultimately, he said his only regret was that he hadn’t eaten her while she was alive. “What I truly wished was to eat her living flesh,” he said. “Nobody believes me, but my ultimate intention was to eat her, not necessarily to kill her.”

Two days after killing Hartevelt, Sagawa disposed of what remained of her body. He had eaten or frozen most of her pelvic region, so he put her legs, torso, and head into two suitcases and hailed a cab. The taxi dropped him off at the Bois de Boulogne park, which had a secluded lake inside it. He had planned to drop the suitcases in it, but several people noticed the suitcases dripping blood and notified the French police. When police found Sagawa and questioned him, his response was a simple admission: “I killed her to eat her flesh,” he said. Sagawa’s wealthy father provided a lawyer for his defense, and after being held for two years awaiting trial, Sagawa was found legally insane and unfit to stand trial by the French judge, Jean-Louis Bruguière, who ordered him held indefinitely in a mental institution.

After a visit by the author Inuhiko Yomota, Sagawa’s account of the murder and its aftermath was published in Japan under the title “In the Fog” (He wrote that he was always short and skinny with legs that “looked like pencils” and he believed that at just under five-feet tall, he was too repulsive to attract the kind of physical intimacy that would have tempered his desires). Sagawa’s subsequent publicity and macabre celebrity likely contributed to the French authorities’ decision to deport him to Japan, where he was immediately committed to Matsuzawa Hospital in Tokyo.

His examining psychologists all declared him sane and found sexual perversion was his sole motivation for murder. As the charges against Sagawa in France had been dropped, the French court documents were sealed and were not released to Japanese authorities; consequently, Sagawa could not legally be detained in Japan. Sagawa checked himself out of the hospital on 12 August 1986, and subsequently remained free until his death. Sagawa’s continued freedom was widely criticized.

Between 1986 and 1997, Sagawa was frequently invited to be a guest speaker and commentator. In 1992, Sagawa appeared in Hisayasu Sato’s exploitation film “Uwakizuma: Chijokuzeme” (“Unfaithful Wife: Shameful Torture”) as a sado-sexual voyeur. Sagawa wrote books about the murder he committed, as well as “Shonen A”, a book on the 1997 Kobe child murders. Sagawa also wrote restaurant reviews for the Japanese magazine “Spa”. Sagawa could no longer find publishers for his writing, and he struggled to find employment. Sagawa was nearly accepted by a French language school because the manager was impressed by his courage in using his real name, but employees protested, and he was rejected.

the threat of life in prison didn’t do much to quell his urges. “The desire to eat people becomes so intense around June when women start wearing less and showing more skin,” he said. “Just today, I saw a girl with a really nice derrière on my way to the train station. When I see things like that, I think about wanting to eat someone again before I die. What I’m saying is, I can’t bear the thought of leaving this life without ever tasting that derrière that I saw this morning, or her thighs,” he continued. “I want to eat them again while I’m alive, so that I can at least be satisfied when I die.” He’s even planned out how he will do it. “I think either sukiyaki or shabu shabu [lightly boiled thin slices] is the best way to go, in order to really savor the natural flavor of the meat.”

As far as people are aware Sagawa refrained from cannibalism. He published over 20 books in total. One of his last books was called “Extremely Intimate Fantasies of Beautiful Girls”, and it is filled with pictures drawn by himself as well as by famous artists. “I hope that people who read it will at least stop thinking of me as a monster,” he said. In 2005, Sagawa’s parents died, and he was prevented from attending their funeral but repaid their creditors and moved into public housing. Sagawa received welfare benefits for a time. In an interview with “Vice Magazine” in 2011, Sagawa said that being forced to make a living while being known as a murderer and cannibal was a terrible punishment.

In 2013, Sagawa was hospitalized from a cerebral infarction, which permanently damaged his nervous system. Then in 2015 he suffered two heart attacks and also had diabetes. He later lived alone and needed daily assistance, which was provided by his younger brother or from caregivers. At the time, he claimed to have regretted the obsession. In 2018, french filmmakers recorded the brothers talking. Sagawa’s brother asks him, “As your brother, would you eat me?” The only response Sagawa gives is an empty stare, and silence. He died from complications of pneumonia at a hospital in Tokyo, on 24 November 2022, at the age of 73.

Issei Sagawa blamed the media’s representation of Western women like Grace Kelly for sparking his cannibalistic fantasies, equating it with what most people would call sexual desire. Where other people dreamed of bedding these beautiful women, Sagawa dreamed of eating them. Sagawa says the reasons behind his cannibalistic tendencies can’t be explained to or conceptualized by anyone who doesn’t share his exact urges.

“It’s simply a fetish,” he said. “For example, if a normal man fancied a girl, he’d naturally feel a desire to see her as often as possible, to be close to her, to smell her and kiss her, right? To me, eating is just an extension of that. Frankly, I can’t fathom why everyone doesn’t feel this urge to eat, to consume, other people.” He maintained, however, that he never thought of killing them, only “gnaw[ing] on their flesh.”

“What I truly wished was to eat her living flesh. To this day I still think ‘if only she had let me taste her, just a little bit’… I want to eat her. If I do, she’ll be mine forever.” – Issei Sagawa

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If you want to watch a documentary on Issei Sagawa then just check out the video below: