LITMIR.BIZ

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Hartevelt was just the type of girl he had been drooling over for all those years.

      According to his confession to the police after his arrest on 11 June 1981, he invited Hartevelt (then aged 25) over to his apartment to read some German poetry – and promptly declared his love for her. Not one to stand on ceremony, he also asked her to go to bed with him. Hartevelt refused. Sagawa acted as if nothing had happened and asked her to resume her reading, which he was recording. At 5.30 p.m., he fetched the rifle and shot her once in the back of the head.

      Sagawa later made a great deal of money by writing about what might have happened next in his bestselling book called Into the Fog, which earned him rave reviews from many Japanese critics. Sagawa set the story in Paris, though in the Latin Quarter, not Montmartre (where he had actually lived). The hero of the piece is called Akito Kamura, a 30-year-old Japanese student who is studying literature at the Sorbonne. Because of his vast intellect, Kamura is greatly appreciated by his teachers but less revered by the other students in the class who regard him as distant and arrogant. The lonely Kamura therefore spends most of his free time listening to classical music, reading and working on his thesis. Then, one day, Kamura meets a student from Holland. She is friendly and open and they quickly become friends. One day he invites her to his apartment for dinner. After she turns down his advances, he shoots her.

      Sagawa has made varying claims as to how much he remembers after he had shot Hartevelt – and also told one journalist that he wrote the book because he was flat broke and needed the money. It’s possible, then, that the acts Sagawa writes about next in the book were exaggerated in order to maximise shock value – and therefore sales. Having said that, many of the details that feature in Into the Fog tally with the autopsy that was carried out on Hartevelt’s corpse. Whatever the case, the chapter on how the hero of the story eats his victims reads as if Sagawa is wistfully reliving a particularly pleasant and unusually long dinner.

      In between declarations of love and gratitude to the lifeless corpse, no part of the body was taboo, and, the way Sagawa tells it in the novel, the more flesh the character eats, the more curious he becomes. Kamura starts off by sinking his teeth into his victim’s buttocks. For some reason, this gives him a headache, so he starts to hack at the body with a knife and starts chewing on the tasteless fat, which is, Sagawa writes, reminiscent of tuna.

      After engaging in sex with the corpse (for ten seconds), Kamura hugs her and then, after a brief scare as the body seems to let out air, he roasts her hip in a pan and seasons it with salt and mustard. While Kamura eats, he listens to her dead voice, recorded reading German poetry only hours before, and dabs at the corners of his mouth with her panties. He then bakes one of her breasts and eats that too.

      Next, Kamura turns in for the night – taking what is left of the corpse with him. With a renewed appetite the next morning, Sagawa’s character is relieved to find that his sleeping partner hasn’t decomposed too badly and almost immediately he starts chewing on her calf and then her ankle. He then moves on to her foot before deciding to eat her armpit.

      By this time, the whole flat smells of what Sagawa describes as ‘fried chicken’ and there are flies buzzing all over the corpse. Saying a final farewell, Kamura begins to dismember the body, only stopping for the occasional snack. He plays around with her internal organs for a while, then puts the head in one plastic bag and the body in the other and stuffs her remains in a suitcase.

      We cannot be sure how closely these actions match the real-life events involving Sagawa himself. We do know that, once Sagawa had finished with Hartevelt’s body, he carefully disposed of her clothes and personal belongings in the River Seine and in rubbish bins around Paris. He also disposed of some of her flesh and internal organs in garbage boxes. Back home, Sagawa saved some parts of her body in the freezer in anatomically labelled bags and called a cab. When the cab driver put the suitcases in the boot, he joked to Sagawa that they were so heavy that he must have a body inside them.

      Sagawa took the cab to the Bois de Boulogne park in Paris with the intention of throwing the remains into the Lac Inférieur – one of the Bois’ many lakes. But the suitcases were so heavy that he didn’t have time to dump them before a middle-aged couple spotted him trying to lug them to the water’s edge; realising that he had been spotted, Sagawa immediately fled, leaving the two suitcases under a bush. After he had disappeared, the couple went looking for a policeman who got a very nasty surprise when he opened up those cases. The couple later provided a description of Sagawa and the taxi driver was able to remember the address he’d picked him up from. Three days later, Sagawa was questioned in his apartment and promptly confessed to the hideous crime.

      It wasn’t long before Sagawa was back sleeping in his own comfy bed at home and walking the Tokyo streets, though. His family employed one of France’s top lawyers to argue his case for a rumoured million-dollar fee and Sagawa was deported back to Japan and treated in the Matsuzawa mental institution for a further 16 months. As he had entered the institution voluntarily, he was also, in theory, able to leave it, and with his father pulling the strings Sagawa walked out a free man in September 1985.

      On his release, Sagawa kept a fairly low profile, embarking on a short-lived career as a dishwasher and also made an unsuccessful attempt to get work as a French tutor. He did, however, persuade a literary magazine to run instalments of one of his novels and he also found more creative work by writing the subtitles for a film about a man who made handbags out of the skin of corpses. But his really big break into show business was just around the corner.

      It was the reign of another Japanese killer, Tsutomu Miyazaki, that paved the way. In 1983, Miyazaki killed four young girls and tormented their families by sending them gleeful accounts of their deaths, along with charred bones and teeth. A painfully shy 26-year-old printer’s assistant, Miyazaki was also a cannibal; he had devoured his grandfather’s cremated bones and gnawed on his final victim’s wrist.

      The case provided Sagawa with a highly fortuitous break. He soon found himself appearing on chat shows and writing editorials for highly respected newspapers and magazines, offering his own peculiar insights and first-hand experiences of what it was like to eat another human being. From there, stardom beckoned.

      Veteran journalist and photographer Antonio Pagnotta was there to observe the phenomenon first hand and wound up spending six months interviewing and researching Sagawa while living and working in Tokyo. It was 1992 and Sagawa was at the height of his popularity. Pagnotta’s story, which was published in France, revealed how adept Sagawa had now become at manipulating the media; protected by a large circle of admirers, he was treated with respect and even awe, happily wallowing in the media spotlight. The report caused shockwaves all over France, where most believed Sagawa to still be locked up in jail.

      Sagawa was furious and publicly claimed that the allegations made by Pagnotta were false in an interview published in a monthly magazine called the Tokyo Journal. When Pagnotta refuted Sagawa’s claims in a letter that was published two months later in the same magazine, Sagawa was livid. ‘I will never ever forgive Antonio Pagnotta, this yakuza photographer has followed me for months and has stolen much information,’ Sagawa wrote to the editors of the Tokyo Journal. ‘I want to hang him upside down and smash his skull with a metal bat. I will kill him for sure.’ Sagawa also left ominous messages on an answer machine, was seen lurking outside Pagnotta’s old apartment and very nearly assaulted him in a restaurant. Indeed, the story took its toll on Pagnotta who suffered recurring nightmares of Sagawa trying to attack him and eat his brain.

      ‘Sagawa is a very cunning man,’ Pagnotta told me. ‘Way beyond imagination, and I suppose the reason he wanted me dead was because I had exposed him in a crude manner as a sexual pervert, porno actor and a could-be serial killer.’

      Pagnotta had first met Sagawa at Tama tube station in 1992. ‘Standing one and a half metres in height, wearing a child-sized white ski jacket and thick, tinted glasses, he stood out unmistakably in the busy Tama station,’ Pagnotta remembers. ‘But everybody ignored him. It was incomprehensible that his child’s body would emanate such a powerful aura of menace. To most, he might seem to be a pathetic midget. There was something more to him. As I approached to shake hands, my instinct, beyond understanding, abruptly set off alarms. His

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