佐川一政 人を食った男 1/2 - Interview with a Cannibal -【VICE】

Sometimes I wonder why I did such a horrible thing.
Maybe it's because I come from another planet,
or another dimension,
and I accidentally fell to Earth like a meteorite,
disguised as a baby crying on the street.
My mother walked by and took pity on me.
I must have come from a place of cannibals,
and I'm the only one of my kind
who exists on this planet.
VBS
meets...
ISSEI SAGAWA
My name is Issei Sagawa.
I was born in Kobe
on April 26th, 1949.
By shooting a bullet as small as my fingertip,
I have hurt and changed many people.
There are consequences to killing someone.
If I had known that earlier
many people would still be alive.
'FRANCE 2 TV', 1983
- This man is a cannibal.
His name is Issei Sagawa.
Last Thursday, he killed his fellow college student with a bullet to the head.
She was a 25 year old Dutch woman named Renée Hartevelt.
He then dismembered the body and kept it at home until Saturday evening.
During these two days he ate his victim's flesh several times.
When he was stopped by the police last night, he still had pieces of the body in his fridge.
I didn't acknowledge Renée's existence until near the end of the course.
She was so beautiful.
I'd never seen a woman like her before.
I didn't want to be caught staring, so I made a sketch of her.
Maybe if we'd had dinner once more,
I wouldn't have eaten her.
I lied to her that my professor
wanted some German poetry recorded.
That was the pretext.
She didn't doubt a thing.
I chose the poetry.
I reached for the gun while she was reading.
I was talking to her with a smile on my face.
I was really scared.
Yet I did pull the trigger.
She...
kept on talking...
until suddenly she fell silent.
First she collapsed onto the desk,
then fell to the ground with the chair.
I laid a towel under her head...
then undressed her.
I had everything planned out in my head,
from which part I would start feasting on and such.
Starting with her ass.
I thought it looked most delicious.
It had to be the right cheek, not the left.
The left cheek is closer to the heart and I'm scared of blood.
I abruptly bit into it.
But it was too hard to bite into.
It hurt my jaw.
I tried cutting in with a fruit knife but it didn't go through.
I gave up and went to the market.
I bought a curved meat knife.
Finally it went through the flesh.
I thought I'd see red meat right away.
But there was a yellow corn-like substance,
which I later found out was fat.
I had to cut in deeply to reach the red meat.
I don't remember if I sliced it off,
or if I tore it off with my fingers.
I put most of my favorite parts,
like the thigh,
in the fridge.
YURIGAOKA, TOKYO.
Without a doubt, my childhood
was the best time of my life.
I was carefree.
My parents loved me deeply.
They raised me lovingly, surrounded by nature.
I was born prematurely.
Doctors didn't think I would survive.
And I remain weak to this day.
I'm still short and frail.
Back in the days when I was young,
sex was still a taboo subject.
I never even heard my parents say the word 'sex' out loud.
So when I reached a certain age and had an erection,
I thought I was sick.
I felt extremely embarrassed.
I didn't know how to masturbate.
So I did weird things,
like making my dog lick it off.
I think my sexual desires began to distort around that time.
When I was in first grade
I was fascinated by a handsome boy's thigh.
The first time I ever felt cannibalistic desires towards a woman
I was so shy my hands shook
and I felt like puking when I called her.
But when I saw her pale thighs coming out from her skirt,
it made me want to taste her flesh.
I don't know why I'm drawn to foreign women.
I was weak and short.
Western women are tall and beautiful.
I think I had a strong yearning for them.
When I was living in Tokyo
a beautiful blonde lady walked by.
I was dazzled by her white thighs.
I was convinced that she lived in the same apartment
my grandmother used to live in.
One day I snuck into her apartment on the ground floor.
She was asleep naked.
I was planning to hit her head with an umbrella and knock her out,
then get a knife from her kitchen
to cut into her ass to eat it.
Hesitantly I crept by her and my knees touched her belly.
She screamed and I got caught.
The police charged me with attempted rape.
Doctors didn't see it as cannibalism.
Of course I didn't say a thing.
PARIS, 1977
I left Tokyo on April 26th, on my 28th birthday.
I went to Paris to study comparative literature
at the Sorbonne University.
I was at the gate with my passport in hand.
My mother had an extremely sad look on her face,
as if she knew something horrible was going to happen.
Her motherly instincts filled with apprehension.
By the time I left for Paris, I had already committed a crime.
I was obsessed with cannibalism.
My desire to eat a woman had changed into an obligation.
This picture is very symbolic.
Bois de Boulogne lay on the other side of my university.
I ended up dumping the body there.
This was taken long before it happened,
as if it were a premonition.
This is me sticking my head out of my window.
This is my room.
This is the bathroom where I cut up Renée's body.
This is where I hid the gun.
She sat here.
I shot her dead from behind.
June is the hottest month in Paris.
I was afraid the corpse would rot.
I had to get rid of it.
I thought I had to cut the body up.
After finishing my graduate program I wanted to go to Greece.
I took a luxury boat
and shared a table with a butcher and his wife.
He was a fat, jolly man,
and he explained to me how to butcher meat.
After the incident I wrote him a thank you letter.
But he never wrote back.
Cutting a body up isn't easy.
I bought two travelling bags.
It wasn't easy getting the body into them.
The torso is extremely heavy.
It's really hard to cut to begin with.
It's nothing like a horror movie.
The lake in Bois de Boulogne didn't leave my mind.
When the cab driver picked up my suitcase, filled with her body,
it was so heavy he asked if there was a corpse in it.
I told him it was books.
I was a fool not to realize
how bright it still is at 8pm in the summer.
Many people were still out sunbathing.
I didn't know where to get out,
but I just had to.
Everyone was staring at me.
I found a quiet place.
I pushed the bags down the slope to the lake.
I didn't have any energy left.
The sun was setting on the lake.
Everything turned red and beautiful.
I saw an old man with a child.
For the first time everything was in color.
While I was being fascinated by it,
I heard someone scream.
I looked behind and saw a man opening up my bag.
He asked if it was mine.
If I had told him it was, he might have left it.
But impulsively I said no.
So he opened it to find a bed sheet covered in blood.
He screamed, "Murderer!" to a woman uphill.
I simply walked away.