On the afternoon of June 12, 1981, a Japanese man named Issei Sagawa walked into the woods in Bois de Boulogne, France, carrying two suitcases. The postgraduate student at the Sorbonne had shot and killed a female exchange student, a classmate of his, the day before. After eating portions of her body, he tried to dump the corpse in a remote lake. Witnesses saw him and he was soon arrested. According to reports, Issei uttered the following to the French police who raided his home: "I killed her to eat her flesh."

French psychologists found Sagawa to have been legally insane at the time of the crime and, therefore, unfit to stand trial. He was subsequently exempted from prosecution. He returned to his homeland, where Japanese authorities tried to put him on trial for murder. French justice officials refused to hand over the necessary documents to carry on and he was again set free.

Personally, we'd probably eat human flesh if there was a massive apocalyptic famine like the siege of Stalingrad or if we were paid $100 trillion a year for life and were guaranteed to never get in trouble and to not get sick from it either. But short of stuff like that, why the fuck would you eat person meat? What are you, an orc? What exactly drove Sagawa to do it? Vice Japan_'s editor, Tomo, who would probably make a pretty tasty little dish himself, courageously visited the cannibal's home to find out the whole story._

Vice: Tell me about the first time you felt cannibalistic urges.

Issei Sagawa: I was physically weak from the moment I was born. My legs were so skinny they looked like pencils. It was in the first grade of elementary school when I saw the quivering meat on a male classmate's thighs and I suddenly thought, "Mmm, that looks delicious." But I'm not homosexual, so from around the time I entered junior high school I became obsessed with the Western actress Grace Kelly—an obsession that lasted right through high school. That was the beginning of my infatuation with Occidental people. Before I knew it, tall, healthy-looking Western women became the trigger for my cannibalistic fantasies. I guess my infatuation with such women stemmed from the fact that I was short, ugly, and had an inferiority complex and therefore sought people who were the exact opposite of myself. Eventually, I began feeling a strong desire to bite into them—not to kill them or eat them per se, but merely to gnaw on their flesh. It was purely a form of sexual desire. It wasn't like I felt like eating someone every time I was hungry. But you know how you tend to feel a stronger sexual desire when you've eaten a full meal? That's when I would start feeling the urge to eat a girl. It's absurd, right? In essence, it's different from the type of hunger that people experience for food. This cannibalistic urge, where I'm going, "I want to eat human meat," is a sort of sexual appetite, so if I don't make sure that I ejaculate frequently enough, the desire only gets stronger and stronger.

And this urge of yours got so pent up that it eventually exploded in the form of the… let's say, the "incident" in Paris?

After I went to study in Paris, my cannibalistic urges showed no signs of slowing down. Almost every night I would bring a prostitute home and then try to shoot them from behind while they washed their vaginas at the bidet. I tried hundreds of times, but for some reason my fingers froze up and I couldn't pull the trigger. From around that time, 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. Yet for some reason, I failed so many times to pull the trigger. Rather than morals and whatnot, it was instinct that stopped my hand from moving. Somewhere in my mind I knew that I, and the world that I lived in, would shatter to pieces the moment I pulled that trigger.

Some time after that, I spotted the girl who would later become my victim in one of my classes at university. All of the French women I had met before then were beautiful, but were stuck-up and totally out of my league. In contrast, this girl was so friendly and warm. I found out after the murder that she was Jewish, which is probably why a Japanese guy like me felt an affinity with her. In any case, we became friends. Then one day, we decided to have a sukiyaki [hot pot] party—just the two of us—at my house. The moment I saw her wash her hands in the bathroom, the image overlapped with the prostitutes washing themselves at the bidet in my mind, and inevitably she became another candidate for my "ritual." From that point on, every time I invited her up to my room, I found myself pointing a gun at her from behind. Still, I just couldn't shoot. Then one day, one of the employees from my father's company came to Paris and took me to a Japanese restaurant. I had a bit of a fever that day, which might have made me delusional, because the whole time I was thinking about how she was coming over the next day, and how if I got food poisoning from the raw fish that I ate there, I wouldn't be able to finally realize the fantasy that I'd been obsessing about for 32 years.

And that made you feel even more that you just had to do this…

Yes. So the next day, I finally pulled the trigger on her—and it misfired. This made me even more hysterical and I knew that I simply had to kill her. I invited her to my house again two days later, and as usual I slowly crept up from behind, took a deep breath, held it in when my lungs were half-full, and pulled the trigger. This time, the gun went off. The girl died instantly without feeling any pain. The autopsy showed that the gun wasn't powerful enough to send the bullet through her skull, so it just kept spinning round and round in her head. For a split second I thought about calling an ambulance, 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!"

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 awhile to actually reach the red meat. 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. That said, it wasn't like I was lusting over the fact that I was cutting up her dead body, so it's difficult for me to revisit the incident and talk about it, even now...

Um…

This must sound rich coming from me, but the moment the girl became a corpse, I realized that I had lost an important friend and even regretted killing her for a moment. What I truly wished was to eat her living flesh. Nobody believes me, but my ultimate intention was to eat her, not necessarily to kill her. To this day, I still think, "If only she had let me taste her, just a little bit..." If we had spent another evening having dinner and chatting about our families, I never would have been able to kill her. In other words, I can't project my fantasies onto somebody who is already personified in my mind. That's why my first candidates were all prostitutes. I had a lot of other female friends as well, but I would never have dreamed of eating them since I considered them human beings with their own individual personalities. People tell me that I killed her because I loved her, but why would I kill and eat someone who I truly loved?