Issei Sagawa, the “Japanese cannibal”, has died at the age of 73

Issei Sagawa, dubbed the “Japanese cannibal” for murdering and eating a Dutch student in Paris in 1981, has died at the age of 73. His crime inspired horror and fascination throughout the world.

Sagawa died on November 24 of pneumonia, and a funeral has already been held with only his relatives in attendance, according to a statement from the editor of a 2019 autobiography by his brother Jun. No public ceremony has been planned, the statement said. additional.

Interned in France and then in Japan

Issei Sagawa was a student in Paris at the Sorbonne University when, on June 11, 1981, he invited a Dutch comrade, Renée Hartevelt, to dinner at his apartment. There, he had killed her with a rifle shot to her neck and raped her before cutting her up and eating different parts of her body for three days.

“Eating this girl was an expression of love. She wanted to feel in me the existence of a person I love, ”she confessed after her arrest.

The experts attested to his mental illness, he had benefited from a dismissal and had been interned in France and then in Japan before regaining his freedom in August 1985.

Various best sellers

Having become a media star, he hosted many journalists at his apartment in the suburbs of Tokyo. He sometimes appeared on Japanese television and had published several best-sellers such as “Cannibal” or “I would like to be eaten” and drew a manga telling his crime.

Japanese writer Juro Kara won the prestigious Akutagawa Literary Prize in 1982 for his crime novel “Sagawa’s Letter.”

Two anthropologists had also made a documentary about him in 2018, entitled “Caniba”, in which Issei Sagawa claimed that he could not “explain” his 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 described his “obsession” as “impossible to contain”, stating: “I wanted to eat ass more than anything in the world.”

The directors of the documentary, Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, said they had been “run through” by a series of “extremely conflicting feelings” during the months they spent in private with 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 brotherhood, about love”.