Yuka Takaoka incident: Gruesome details emerge about ‘crime of passion’

TOKYO (TR) – On May 23, Yuka Takaoka, 21, was arrested for allegedly using a kitchen knife to stab her boyfriend, who is a bar host, at their fifth-floor residence in Shinjuku Ward.

The victim, 20, was transported to a hospital where he remains in serious condition, police said at the time.

Thereafter, Takaoka became a social media sensation. Users found the situation — including Takaoka’s appearance — highly compelling. On Instagram, she garnered tremendous attention as the “too beautiful attempted murder suspect.”

Adding to the mix was news footage that showed her flashing an evil grin beneath her large glasses inside the back seat of a patrol car as she was taken from the scene.

As Fuji News Network (May 30) tells it, that image reflected what was truly a “crime of passion” — and a truly gruesome one at that, as new details reveal.

Hands and legs covered in blood

Officers arriving at the scene at around 4:00 p.m. that day found Takaoka seated on the floor of the building’s lobby, her hands and legs covered in blood.

“I did not want to go anywhere, so I sat down at the outside staircase,” she reportedly said. “I did not call emergency services because I intended to die after watching him die from the stabbing.”

In one image that emerged later, she simultaneously talks on the telephone and smokes a cigarette with the her boyfriend, his abdomen sliced open, collapsed behind her atop a blood-smeared floor.

“The walls of the elevator were covered in blood, and the buttons for the third and fourth floors were also smeared in blood, as if a bloody hand had touched them,” a tenant tells the network.

Kabukicho complications

Until the middle of May, Takaoka was employed as the manager of a so-called “girl’s bar,” which is a type of hostess club. Last October, she met her boyfriend, whose club is located in the Kabukicho red-light district.

They began to live together on May 20. Three days later, he came home late, despite the fact that she was waiting for him.

A source connected to the nightlife in Kabukicho told Tokyo Sports, “While looking at his smartphone, she saw him in an intimate photograph with another woman. She appears to have stabbed him as he slept.”

“After I stabbed him, he said he liked me”

In describing her motive, Takaoka initially told police, “Since I loved him so much, I just couldn’t help it.” However, her thoughts went far deeper — and darker — than that statement.

“I was sad and seeking to die, and I thought how I would like to go about it,” she said. “I thought I would kill him because I thought that was how I could be with him. I thought that expressions such as ‘I like you’ and ‘I would like to be with you’ would become a reality if [we both] die.”

Investigators retrieved a knife from the residence. “It was the one thing I put in order in preparing for a new life with him,” she said. “After I stabbed him, he said he liked me.”