INTERVIEW AND PHOTOS BY TOMOKAZU KOSUGA, TRANSLATED BY LENA OISHI 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? ’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: 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?
sukiyaki And that made you feel even more that you just had to do this…
Um…
For his new book, Extremely Intimate Fantasies of Beautiful Girls, Sagawa illustrated and wrote about famous women including Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Leni Riefenstahl, and Julie Delpy.

Did you eat her raw?

Mostly, yes. At first I bit into her butt with the intention of munching right through, but it’s impossible! Human skin is so thick. I ended up with a sore jaw, although I managed to leave some teeth marks. I ended up swallowing the clitoris and some pubes without chewing on it because she had her period then and the smell was just horrendous. But it was the first moment that I actually felt a sort of sexual pleasure in eating her, as if my inner body was on fire. Also, you know how beef or whale meat has a sort of beastly smell to it? Human meat is odorless. I actually believe that human meat is the tastiest of all meats. It doesn’t have any of that gamey animal smell. When I ate some more a couple of days later, just before I got arrested, the meat had become sweeter and it tasted great. The meat on the soles of her feet smelled bad, though, and didn’t taste very nice. The neck was the best. The meat tastes more delicate as you move up the body, especially above the torso. Her tongue was delicious as well. I took it out of her mouth and chewed on it raw. Neither the neck nor the tongue has much meat on it, though, so if you really want to feast, you should eat the thighs.

I’m just going to plod ahead with these questions so I can get the fuck out of here. Would you say that you were trying to free yourself from your personal insecurities by eating human meat?

No, it’s not nearly as conceptual as that. It’s simply a fetish. Besides, I only wanted to bite into her and have a little taste, rather than actually consuming the meat. Of course, I still have this sexual appetite of wanting to eat a beautiful woman’s body. For example, if a normal man fancied a girl, he’d naturally feel a desire to see her as often as possible, to be close to her, to smell her and kiss her, right? To me, eating is just an extension of that. Obviously the general public doesn’t understand. But the thing is, sure I want to eat the girl, but I don’t necessarily want to kill her in the process. Once she’s dead, she’s merely a corpse—a “thing.” If possible, I’d like to eat her alive. Frankly, I can’t fathom why everyone doesn’t feel this urge to eat, to consume, other people. Don’t you ever feel like this?

I’d say some gentle nibbling is enough for me.

That’s what they all say. What’s wrong with eating, though? Georges Bataille believed that the kiss is the beginning of cannibalism, and I agree. I feel like it stems from the same instincts of wanting to “taste” the other. Although I guess this is just my personal opinion.

Do you still have these cannibalistic urges?

Oh yes, definitely. The desire to eat people becomes so intense around June, when women start wearing less and showing more skin. Just today, I saw a girl with a really nice derrière on my way to the train station. When I see things like that, I think about wanting to eat someone again before I die. So yes, I do still harbor these desires, and I specifically want to eat a Japanese woman this time. I think either sukiyaki or shabu shabu [lightly boiled thin slices] is the best way to go in order to really savor the natural flavor of the meat. Can you please call for people who would willingly be eaten by me in your magazine? There’s one condition, though: They have to be young, beautiful women.

OK, I guess we can do that. Here we go… Hey, all women—especially young, beautiful Japanese ones—who are reading this: Issei Sagawa wants to eat you. If you’d like to be murdered and consumed by him, please contact Vice’s Tokyo office and we will put you in touch.

Look, what I’m saying is, I can’t bear the thought of leaving this life without ever tasting that derrière that I saw this morning, or her thighs. I want to eat them again while I’m alive, so that I can at least be satisfied when I die. I guess I’m being egotistical, but if I could really go through with it, then after that I’d have no qualms about being put to death via the guillotine or by hanging or whatever. There’s no doubt in my mind that I want to eat human flesh again, though. I mean, it’s delicious stuff. It’s widely believed that human meat doesn’t taste good, but they only spread that rumor because it’s a taboo that can’t be crossed. If people found out the truth, I’m sure that men would all start eating women. So they don’t talk about it because it will create pandemonium, but I tell you, human meat is extremely tasty.

Are you interested in anything other than human meat, like excrement, for example?

Eating excrement is going too far, but I did have a female acquaintance who would always let me drink her piss and spit. She doesn’t let me anymore since she’s married, but before that she would stand above my head and piss directly into my mouth. It was delicious, and it didn’t smell funny at all. The strange thing was that once she gave birth, she would leave bottles of her piss at my house for me to drink but I just couldn’t, because it reeked of motherhood, of a mother caring for her baby. It’s a horrible thing to say, but I guess I began to see her as a “mother” rather than a sexual female being.

Do you have a message for all of the girls around the world reading this?

Sure, I would like to invite any woman who wants to kill me to step forward. Beautiful women only. That would be the ideal way for me to die. Maybe they can shoot me up with morphine so that I don’t feel any pain—although I guess the pain is part of the pleasure. Dying instantly is boring, so I want to savor the process of being killed. An alternative would be to drown in female saliva. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be covered all over with women’s spit? If I could die drowning in it, that would be my ultimate dream come true. I’m a cowardly man who killed another person, yet I can’t face killing myself. So I guess dying at the hands of a woman would be my way to redemption.

What do you think you would be doing now if you hadn’t pulled that trigger back in Paris?

At my age, it’s not unusual to have kids. My biggest regret is that I couldn’t give my parents a grandchild. Why on earth did I pull the trigger that day? That one small action changed everything. It made such a big impact on my life. The moment I killed her, I instinctually thought, “I’m no longer a human being.” I believe that it would have been much easier on me had I been given the death penalty. It’s so tough living out in the open. That’s reason enough for never committing the same crime ever again! You can’t imagine how difficult it is to live under surveillance from society. In that respect, I really believe that the death penalty just puts people out of their misery, and it totally defeats the purpose of punishment. The victim’s family always say things like, “I’ll never forgive so-and-so, even if they’re put to death,” despite the fact that it’s actually meant to be the harshest punishment. It’s so meaningless. Even with a life sentence, they give you clothes, food, and shelter in jail, plus they let you work. But if you’re out in society, you have to somehow make a living and find a place to stay. What harsher punishment can there be? It’s brutal.

How are you making a living right now?

Back in the summer of 1989, a serial killer called Tsutomu Miyazaki murdered some young girls, and the mass media suddenly flocked to my house asking for my opinion on the case. That sort of media exposure eventually led to my essays being published in various magazines. Since then, I’ve published one or two books per year. I recently published my 20th book. It’s entitled Gokushiteki Bijyogenso [Extremely Intimate Fantasies of Beautiful Girls]. It portrays my feelings toward women without necessarily focusing on cannibalism, through pictures and words. I hope that people who read it will at least stop thinking of me as a monster.

Now watch the video: VICE Meets Issei Sagawa.