The Kobe Cannibal Got A Food Column

Japanese true crime and Japanese folklore, one candle at a time.

In June 1981, a Japanese literature student in Paris asked a Dutch classmate to come to his apartment and help him with his German pronunciation. Renée Hartevelt was twenty-five. She said yes because she was the kind of person who noticed when somebody was sitting on their own.

Issei Sagawa confessed within days. He was never convicted, never imprisoned, and never spent a single night in a cell. He spent the next thirty-six years being interviewed, published, booked and paid — and at one point, employed as a restaurant critic.

This episode pairs his case with the jikininki: the Buddhist hungry ghost, cursed to devour the dead every night through a throat too narrow to swallow anything at all. A creature no court can touch, no prison can hold, and no executioner can reach — one that ends only when somebody finally decides to stop feeding it.

Two stories about an appetite that was never the crime.

It was the sentence.

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Contains: graphic violence, cannibalism, sexual violence (referenced, not depicted), and detailed discussion of a real victim. Listener discretion advised.

Chapters
00:00 The Lighting
02:40 The Priest at the Hermitage
15:30 Renée
20:40 The Woman in the Ground-Floor Apartment
27:30 The Eleventh of June
36:00 The Hole in the Law
40:00 The Godfather
43:30 The Rite
50:00 The Ones Who Keep The Candles Lit

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There is an old Japanese game. A hundred candles are lit in a windowless room. Every story told puts one out. Nobody agrees on what arrives when the last one dies — only that you should not be there to see it.

This is Candle 001.

Ninety-nine to go...