Issei Sagawa Interviews

On June 11, 1981, Issei Sagawa shot Renee Hartevelt in the back of the head. Across the span of two days he butchered her body, at portions of her flesh, and had sex with her corpse. He was arrested after attempting to dump the body in a nearby lake. Due to a mistranslation on his medical records, Sagawa was deemed mentally unfit to stand trial and was extradited back to Japan. The mistake was caught but Japan’s legal system was unable to pursue charges, Sagawa has been a free man ever since and has even become a sort of morbid celebrity. He’s written books, has done interviews, has written restaurant reviews for magazine, has had acting roles, and even took part in sadomasochistic pornography, all due to his odd sort of celebrity status.

Looking at every one of his behaviors and mannerisms, Sagawa would be a perfect candidate for attachment theory. Going off of Patton, Nobles, and Fox’s studies that state that, “Individuals who self-reported stalking perpetration were more likely to score highly on the ECR-R scale of insecure-anxious attachment than those who did not stalk,” (2010). Sagawa’s behaviors from early childhood and up until the murder of Hartevelt are marked with stalking, obsession, and fixating. In an interview with VICE, Sagawa explains that he nearly his first victim when he was 23 and developed an infatuation with a blonde woman, “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 and eat it,” (2011). The woman ended up waking up before that could happen, leading to Sagawa being charged with attempted rape.
He even describes developing a fixation on Hartevelt when he saw her during their classes at Sorbonne Academy in Paris, he describes in the interview that “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,” (2011). Even now that years have passed, Sagawa’s fixations and obsessions haven’t seen to subsided. Throughout the interview, he flips through albums dedicated to pictures of women he was infatuated with. His walls lined with photos of actresses and he says, “Of course, they’re beautiful and I think they looks delicious,” (2011). His entire fascination with cannibalism stems from early fixation with thighs, as he states that “When I was in first grade, I was fascinated with a handsome boy’s thigh,” (2011). This would later trigger what he calls his first cannibalistic thought, “But when I saw her pale thighs coming out of her skirt, it made me want to taste her flesh,” (2011). Sagawa was 61 during the time the VICE interview was taken, his obsessions and fixations has been with him since first grade and into his sixties. He also seems to cling to his infamous act, writing books about the Hartevelt murder and throughout the interview he proudly shows of the crime scene photos. It becomes clear that Sagawa would rate highly on the insecure-anxious score, he exhibits a complete inability to let go of a person or an idea once he’s become fixated on

it.
All of this being said, this seems to be where the similarities between Sagawa and attachment theory end. Sagawa might be what the result of theory playing would be, his obsession and inability to make non-dysfunctional social connections, his background doesn’t match. The very basis of attachment theory is that someone with such an insecure-anxious attachment is this way because of a poor relationship with their mother in some way. “Bowlby contend that a child needs to experience a warm, intimate, and continuous relationship with either a mother or a mother substitute. When a child is separated from their mother or is rejected by her, anxious attachment results, “(Adler. Mueller, and Laufer 88); but this is far from the truth in the case of Sagawa. He states throughout the beginning of the interview, that he had an extremely positive relationship with both of his parents, “Without a doubt, my childhood was the best time of my life, I was carefree. My parents loved me deeply. They raise me lovingly, surrounded by nature,” (2011). He speaks specifically about how sad his mother was when they were at the airport and he was getting ready to leave for Paris, “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,” (2011). He has nothing but kind words for his parents, it’s clear that he had a very close and loving relationship with his mother.
Attachment theory, in this instance, is skilled at categorizing Sagawa. It’s clear to see that he does have issues regarding the way he connects with other and, as the theory suggests, it materializes in the form of his stalking and his obsessions. But, in this circumstance, it’s very poor at finding source for this behavior. Sagawa isn’t an instance of a murderer who comes from a dysfunctional family, he never went without love as a child and he was never abused. His family is wealthy, he was able to travel the world and have many opportunities given to him that many could only dream of. Yet, he still developed this obsession with eating the flesh of women he found attractive and felt obligated to act on it. He’s a very odd case of not having any obvious cause or reason for his actions. Sagawa’s only reason for murdering and eating Hartevelt was to scratch an itch he had since he was a child. It’s an odd murder and it would be hard for many theories to quite define what happened in this instance, since other than he wanted to do it, there doesn’t seem to be a motive, cause, or reason.