Fact is Stranger than Fiction Friday (4) Japan’s Celebrity Cannibal

After a long sabbatical Fact is Stranger than Fiction Friday is back.  How often do we hear of a horror film being based on a true story only to find out that it's merely loosely based on several different events that may or may not have happened? You get the idea.  This week we look at Japan's celebrity cannibal.

If you are anything like me the nearest you have ever got to meeting a cannibal is to pop Silence of the Lambs in to the DVD player and lust over Lecter's pure abandon.  He makes you fear him and like him all at once, but that's just make believe.  Safe.  A real cannibal's need to feed is far stronger than our worst hunger pains.  And is more frenzied than any starved animal.  And just like a wild animal, cannot be tamed.

In 1981 Issei Sagawa, born and raised in Japan, invited a fellow student to his French flat to discuss literature.  Once behind closed doors and after recording her reciting some poetry, Sagawa shot his new friend Renee Hartevelt, in the neck.  He'd been planning this for a long time; to kill and then eat another human being.  But not just any human.  You see, he had issues, apart from the obvious lady eating issues he was displaying.  He thought he was ugly.  And he thought Hartevelt was beautiful and wanted to keep her.  Forever.  As far as he was concerned, devouring her was a way of taking those characteristics he felt he lacked.  He wanted to feed off people not for the sole purpose of eating the flesh but to also make him a better person.

Sagawa had sex with the body and took various photographs.  When he was done he dumped what was left of her in a Paris park, but was seen doing so.  Police traced Sagawa in a matter of days and arrested him for Hartevelt's murder.  Once examined by numerous psychiatrists and deemed incurable he was deported back to Japan. 

I first heard the full story of Sagawa about fifteen years ago in a TV documentary.  After hearing every gruesome detail recounted they revealed to an innocent me that he was in fact free, not in prison at all.  His father was rich and very influential and ensured he was release five years after the murder.  He now lives an extraordinary life as a celebrity.  So, Issei Sagawa; novelist, artist, food critic, soft porn star, cannibal.  Is he cured?  Was it a one off?  Or will he get hungry again?