There is an old game in

Japan. You need 100 candles, a room with no windows,

and enough people to last the night.

You light all 100,

and then one at a time, each person tells a story, something true or something they

heard was true,

which is not always the same thing.

And when the story is finished, the teller walks to the candles and blows one out.

The room gets darker, story by story, candle by candle.

And the whole point of the game, the reason people played it for 400 years,

is what is supposed to happen when the 100th candle goes out.

Nobody agrees on what that is.

They only agree that you should not be there to see it.

So,

before we begin,

have you ever been so hungry, properly hungry,

the kind that empties you, that you stopped being able to think about anything

else,

where the hunger stopped being a feeling

you were having

and became the only thing you were?

Have you ever wanted something you knew you were not allowed to want

and found that the wanting didn't get smaller when you refused it,

that it just got patient?

Here's the last one.

This one I want you to actually answer quietly

in your own head, because nobody can hear you.

When you imagine that thing you were not allowed to have,

did you imagine getting it,

or did you imagine what would happen to you afterwards?

And did the afterwards ever once

look like a punishment?

Because tonight's story is about a man who did the worst thing a person can do to

another person,

and then he was not punished,

not for a day, not for an hour. He lived another 41 years, and he was famous,

and he was invited onto television,

and people paid him money,

and he died in a warm bed

with his family nearby.

And I wanna be very clear with you right at the start

that this is not going to be an episode about a man escaping his punishment.

This is going to be an episode

about a man who received the oldest punishment there is

and never once realized

it had already started.

My name is The Tale Teller,

and I'm your host. This is Hyakumonogatari.

There are 100 candles.

This is the 1st.

600 years ago, in the mountains of Mino Province,

a priest got lost.

His name was Muso Kokushi,

and he was not a nobody.

He was one of the great Zen teachers of his age, the kind of man emperors wrote

to.

But that day,

he was just a man on a mountain, and the mountain had done what mountains do,

which is that the path he was following stopped being a path somewhere behind him,

and he did not notice when.

The light was going. In the mountains, the light doesn't set so much as it gets

taken,

all at once, the way a hand closes.

And then he saw a hermitage.

It was a small place, one room, a roof, an old priest inside sitting with a lamp.

Muso did what any traveler would do. He called out. He apologized for the hour,

and he asked for a night's shelter.

And the old priest said,

"No."

Not, "I have no room." Not, "I have no food." Just, "No.

Go down the hill. There's a village. Ask there."

And then he turned back to his lamp and did not look at Muso again. And something

in the way he didn't look at him was strange enough that Muso remembered it

later.

So Muso went down to the village,

and the village was in mourning. The head man had died that day, and the house was

full of people.

And they took Muso in the way people do take priests in when there's been a death,

gratefully and a little desperately.

They fed him. They asked him to say the words. And then as the night came on, the

head of the household came to him and explained very apologetically that

everyone was leaving.

Muso didn't understand. The man explained it as gently as he could.

"It is a custom here. When someone dies in the village, the body is laid out and the

offerings are placed, and then everybody, every single person, walks to the next

village and stays there until morning. Nobody remains. Nobody has remained for as

long as anyone can remember."

Muso asked, "Why?"

And the man said, "Because things happen to the body.

If someone is here, things happen to them."

Now, Muso Kokushi was a Zen priest of enormous accomplishment,

and Zen priests of enormous accomplishments

have a particular character flaw,

which is that they do not believe anything can hurt them.

So he said quite calmly that he would stay.

He would sit with the dead man and say the service properly, the way it ought to be

said.

The villagers begged him not to. He stayed anyway.

So picture this,

an empty village, not a quiet village, an empty one.

Every house dark, every door open because they'd left in a hurry. One room with a

lamp in it, one body laid out under a cloth, the offerings arranged in front of

it, rice, water, incense, and one man sitting cross-legged beside it, saying

the words.

And some time after midnight, the shape came in.

Muso couldn't move.

He said afterwards that it wasn't fear exactly, that his body had simply been

switched off, that he was a pair of eyes in a room and nothing else.

He couldn't turn his head. He could only see what was in front of him.

And what was in front of him was a shape,

and he could never afterwards describe it any better than that.

This man who had spent his life finding precise words for imprecise things, a

shape.

It came in low.

It went to the body,

and it ate it.

It ate it in the way an animal eat,

not neatly.

It took the body apart, and it consumed it, and it did not hurry,

and it did not stop. And Muso sat 6 feet away with the lamp burning and watched

every 2nd of it because he could not close his eyes.

And when the body was gone, the shape turned to the offerings, the rice, the

water, the incense that had been lit for the dead man's soul, and ate those too.

And then it left,

and it did not look at him once, not once. In the whole time, it never acknowledged

that there was a living man in the room, as though he were furniture or as though

he were not food or as though it had been long ago stopped being able to notice

anything that wasn't.

In the morning, the villagers came back and found him alive, and they were amazed.

And he was, by his own account,

not really able to speak for a while.

And when he could speak, he went back up to the hill

because he had remembered something.

He'd remembered that there was a hermitage up there

and that the old priest in it had refused to let him stay on the one night of the

year when staying

was fatal.

The old priest was there,

and this time he let Muso in.

And before Muso could accuse him of anything,

he began to confess.

He said,

"I

am the thing you saw last night."

Here is what he told him.

Long ago, he had been the priest of that village, the only one.

Every death for miles came through his hands, every funeral, every service for

the dead, every set of words that carried a soul out of the world and into the next

one.

He had not believed a single syllable of it.

He performed the rites correctly, perfectly.

Nobody ever complained, but he was doing it for the payment,

for the rice and the money and the standing. Grief came to his door every

week with its hands full,

and he took what was in the hands and gave back a performance.

He treated the most sacred thing humans do,

the handing over of our dead,

as a transaction, as food.

And when he died, he said,

this

is what he was reborn as,

a jikininki,

a human-eating ghost.

And now,

now

he must eat the corpses of the people in the district. Not may,

must. Every death for miles still coming through his hands. He is still the priest

of that village. He is simply doing now in the flesh

what he was always doing in his heart.

And here is the part of the story that I need you to hold onto for the next 40

minutes because everything tonight is going to come back to it.

He is awake in there.

The jikininki is not a monster in a sense of being empty. It isn't a shark. It knows

exactly what it is doing while it does it. It is repulsed by what it is doing

while it does it. In the Buddhist scheme, these things belong to the world of the

gaki, the hungry ghosts.

The hungry ghosts are described with enormous swollen bellies and throats no

wider than a needle. They can eat forever and never get anything down.

What does reach them turns into fire or filth in their mouth.

That's the design. That's the whole engineering of it. The punishment for an

insatiable appetite is not that you are starved.

It is that you are fed constantly,

forever, and it never, ever works.

And by day, and I want you to notice this because we're going to need it later,

by day, he looks like a man. He sits in his hermitage in his robes with his lamp,

and travelers come past, and they see a slightly odd, slightly unfriendly old

priest. There is nothing to see. There is no mark on him.

He can pass 100 conversations, and nobody will know.

Only at night and only over the dead does the shape come back.

So,

the long old priest begs Muso for the one thing that can help him.

Not for forgiveness. He doesn't ask for that. He asks for a

segaki,

a rite that is performed for hungry ghosts, the one where the living set out

food specifically for the things that cannot be fed.

He asks Muso to perform it for him and to release him.

And Muso agrees, and they sit together, and he begins. And partway through the

words, the hermitage is gone. Not collapsed,

gone.

Muso Kokushi is kneeling in long grass on an open hillside in daylight, and there is

no building,

and there is no priest, and there never was.

There is only beside him, half swallowed by moss, a stone tomb, the kind they used

to raise for a priest. Very old.

Nobody had tended it in a long, long time.

And that's the story. It's been written down for centuries. The version most of us

know in English comes through Lafcadio Hearn, the Greek Irishman who moved to

Japan in 1890 and spent the rest of his life collecting the things people still

half believed.

He published it in 1904 in a book called Kwaidan.

He died the same year.

Now,

hold all of that. The hunger that is itself the sentence, the mouth too narrow

to be filled, the thing that looks like a human in daylight and can hold a

conversation,

and the fact,

this is the one, this is the one that matters,

the fact that a jikininki cannot be arrested, cannot be executed, and cannot

be imprisoned. There is no authority that has jurisdiction over it. It can only ever

be ended if someone living

decides to perform a rite for it.

Nobody can punish it.

Somebody has to choose

to stop feeding it.

Right.

Come down off the mountain with me. It's 1981,

and we are in Paris. Before anything else,

I'm gonna tell you about the person this happened to, because in almost every

version of this story you'll ever find, she gets about one sentence and then she

disappears for the rest of the runtime. And that is precisely exactly the thing I

don't want to do tonight.

Her name was Renee Hartevelt.

Just to repeat, Renee Hartevelt.

She was 25 years old. She was Dutch.

She was a student at the Sorbonne in Paris, studying French literature, and she

was extraordinarily good with languages. French, English, German, her own.

The kind of person who picks them up almost carelessly, who ends up translating

for everyone in the room without ever having volunteered.

She was tall, around 5 foot 10.

By every account of her,

she was,

in a very specific way that I think a lot of you will recognize, she was the person

in the seminar who noticed the one student who wasn't talking to anybody and went

and talked to them.

That's it. That's what happened to her.

That is the entire mechanism of this story. She noticed a man who was on his

own, and she was kind to him.

He was born on the 26th of April 1949 in Kobe,

and he was born far too early.

He was tiny, and he was sick, and the doctors told his parents not to expect him

to survive the year.

He did survive. He never really stopped being that infant, though.

He grew into a man who stood a shade under 5 feet tall with small hands and a frame

like a bird's.

And he would be describing himself as weak and ugly and small for the rest of his

life, right into his 70s actually, to anyone who put a microphone in front of

him.

His family had money, serious money. His father, Akira, ran Kurita Water

Industries, a major Japanese corporation. His grandfather had been an editor at the

Asahi Shimbun.

This is a household with lawyers and with reach,

and I need you to file that away, because in about 20 minutes, it becomes the single

most important fact in this entire story. He said the hunger started when he was 6.

He gave his account many times over the decades, and the details drift,

which is in its own kind of tell. But the core of it is always the same. A

school-aged boy in a room looking at another person's body and feeling

something that he shouldn't,

or at least something that he understood even then was the wrong shape.

Not desire the way other people describe desire, not wanting to be with someone.

Wanting to have them internally, permanently,

in the only way a body can

be permanently had.

He said later that when he watched Western films as a boy, Grace Kelly, the tall,

pale woman in the magazines his classmates were falling in love with,

he understood perfectly what his friends felt, and he felt it too.

And it simply arrived in him as appetite instead.

Where they imagined a kiss, mwah,

he imagined a mouthful.

He stared this the way you would describe being colorblind, as a wiring fault he'd

noticed early and could do nothing about.

Now, I want to be careful here,

and I want you to be careful with me. Every single word we have about his

interior life comes from him.

From a man who spent 40 years being paid for his interior life and who understood

very well that the market rewarded a good story about a tragic monster, some of this

is probably true. Some of it's probably a product.

You will not be able to tell which is which,

and neither can I.

And that

is the part of what he did to us.

Here's the part that almost nobody includes, and it's the part that should

have ended all of this, to be honest. He was 24. He was in Tokyo studying at Wako

University,

and there was a German woman living in a ground floor apartment in a building his

family had a connection to.

His grandmother had lived there.

He followed her home. He watched the place. He worked out that the window was

reachable,

and one night he went in while she was asleep.

He was not there to rob her. He said

decades later that his plan was to cut a piece of flesh from her body, just a

piece.

He was very insistent on this. He wasn't planning to kill her.

He was planning to take it away with him and eat it.

She woke up.

She fought him.

This woman, whose name we do not have, woke up in the dark with a man in her

bedroom, and she fought him off and put him on the floor,

and the police came and took him away.

And she is the reason we are not talking tonight about a much longer list of names.

He was arrested. He was charged with attempted rape

because he never told anybody what he'd actually come for. And why would he?

And who would have believed him?

And then his father paid.

A settlement was reached with the victim. The charges went away. There was no

conviction. There was no record. There was no psychiatric order. There was no

monitoring. A 24-year-old man broke into a sleeping woman's bedroom with a specific

and articulable plan to remove part of her body,

and the consequences,

well, was a check.

And the file closed, and he went back to university.

4 years later, in 1977, he flew to Paris to begin a doctorate in comparative

literature at Sorbonne. And when they processed his student paperwork there,

well,

nothing was on it.

Nothing at all.

A polite, small, very well-read young man from a good family arriving to study

literature.

So I wanna slow down here because this next part is the part that the sensational

retellings skip, and it's the part that actually frightens me, to be fair. He was

in Paris for 4 years before he did it, 4 years, and he has since described in

interviews and in his own books what those 4 years consisted of. He brought women to

his apartment repeatedly,

over and over, sex workers mostly,

women whose absence he correctly understood the world was less likely to

investigate. And each time, he intended to go through with it.

And each time, he

didn't.

He said he lost his nerve, that his hands shook,

that he'd get up to the moment and find he couldn't. He'd let them leave, and he'd

sit in the room afterwards, and the hunger would come back.

And here's the thing. Here's the mechanism I want you to see.

It came back stronger every single time.

Every refusal fed it.

He was not fighting an urge for 4 years. He was training one. Every time he took it

to the edge and pulled back, he was teaching himself the route. He was making

the unthinkable into the familiar. By the 4th year, the only thing left standing

between him and it was nerve, and nerves are muscles that get tired.

And in that 4th year, he brought a rifle,

a 22.

He kept it in the apartment, 10 Rue Erlanger, 16th arrondissement,

a decent building in a decent part of Paris. He'd get the rifle where he could

reach it from behind the desk. He was ready before he had chosen anybody.

And then he met a woman in his seminar who was tall and healthy and radiantly alive

and good at every language he was struggling with and who was kind to him

because he was small and awkward and always on his own.

I think you can see where this is going.

He asked her for help with the German poetry. That was it. That was the whole

trap. That was the entire architecture of it.

I'm in disbelief, really. No threats, no drugs, no force, no lie that a reasonable

person would ever catch.

A shy classmate who's struggling with a language you happen to be fluent in asking

you to come around and read some verse aloud so you can hear the pronunciation

done properly.

She said yes, of course.

And of course, she said yes.

I mean, you would have said yes.

I would have said yes. It is nothing.

It's an hour of your evening and a nice feeling about yourself afterwards. And

that's what makes this the version of this story that I find hardest to put down

because there is no warning inside.

There's no red flag she missed. He was not careless. There is no lesson at the end

of this for you to take home and protect yourself with.

She was killed by her own decency, and there was no other way it could have gone.

The 11th of June 1981,

she came to the apartment. She sat at his desk with her back to the room, and she

began to read German poetry out aloud.

He stood up, and he picked up the rifle,

and he shot her once in the back of the neck.

And then

he

fainted.

That's the detail I can't get out of my head. 4 years of rehearsal, a purchased

rifle, a prepared room, a selected victim, and the actual physical reality of it,

the blood coming out onto the desk and floor, put him on the ground unconscious

next to her. He came around some time later, and by his own account, the 1st

thing he felt lying on the floor of that room was

calm.

He said the noise stopped. For the 1st time in his life, he said the wanting had

gone quiet.

Huh.

I'm going to tell you what happened over the next 3 days,

and I'm going to tell you honestly, and then I'm going to stop.

I'm not going to itemize it,

not because I think you're squeamish

and not to protect you,

but because the entire industry that grew up around this man ran on exactly that

itemization. He sold it. Magazines bought it. He was invited on television to

describe it.

If I lay it out beat by beat for entertainment, then I'm not reporting on

that machine.

I am the newest part of it. So once, plainly,

and then we'll move.

He sexually violated her body after she was dead.

That is in the French police file, and it is in his own published account, and I

will not be expanding on it.

He then discovered that he physically could not do what he had spent his whole

life planning to do. His teeth weren't up to it, so he went out into Paris, into an

ordinary June afternoon, past people on the street, and bought a butcher's knife,

and he came back. And for 3 days, he ate parts of her, some raw, some cooked in a

pan with seasoning like a meal.

He photographed it as he went, and when he was not doing that, he was reading. He

wrote later about sitting in that flat with her in the next room, reading books

and thinking that he had never been so peaceful.

Goodness.

On the 13th of June, he had a problem, which is that his apartment now contained

a body he had not finished with, and the weather was warm.

So he bought 2 large suitcases.

He put what was left of Renee into them, and then he went out onto the street in

the 16th arrondissement,

4 foot something, 90 odd pounds in daylight,

4 foot something, 90 odd pounds in daylight, dragging 2 suitcases that were

far too heavy for him. He couldn't lift them into a taxi on his own.

He needed help. He got the taxi to take him to Bois de Boulogne,

the big park on the western edge of Paris, because there's a lake there, and he

intended to sink them.

And he couldn't do that either.

He couldn't carry them far enough.

He got them out of the car, and he got some distance in, and then he simply

couldn't move them another meter.

He was standing in a public park in the middle of the day with 2 suitcases that

were leaking.

People saw him. A jogger noticed. He panicked, and he left them there in the

open and walked away.

And the taxi driver, the one he needed help from, the one who'd wondered what was

so heavy,

remembered exactly where he'd picked him up.

The police were at Rue Erlanger within days,

and when they came through the door, he didn't run, and he didn't deny. He told

them 8 words, more or less, which have been quoted in every account of this case

ever since.

"He killed her in order to eat her flesh."

And they opened his refrigerator, and there she was.

Now, here is where this stops being a horror story and becomes something worse,

which is a paperwork story. He was held. For roughly 2 years, he sat in French

custody awaiting trial, and during that time, the psychiatric evaluations were

done, and the French examiners concluded that he was legally insane, that he was

not fit to stand trial. In 1983, the case was dismissed. No trial, no verdict, no

conviction.

He was committed indefinitely to a psychiatric hospital in France instead.

I want to be precise about this because this is where people usually wave their

hands.

Akira Sagawa, president of a major Japanese corporation with the resources

that implies, negotiated to have his son transferred out of the French system and

repatriated to Japan on medical grounds. In 1984, that transfer happened. Sagawa

flew home, escorted, and was admitted to Matsuzawa Psychiatric Hospital in Tokyo.

And here is where the trap closes on everyone except him.

The doctors at Matsuzawa examined him, and they disagreed with the French flatly.

The superintendent's position was that this man was sane, that he understood

exactly what he had done, and that he belonged in a prison and not in a hospital

bed.

Excellent. So charge him.

They couldn't

because the crime happened in France,

and France had never convicted him.

The case was dismissed. He was a patient, not a prisoner. And the French case

documents, the evidence, the file, the material a Japanese prosecutor would have

needed to build an independent case

were never handed over to Japanese authorities. So Japan had a man in a

hospital who its own doctor said was sane, who had confessed on the record to a

killing in another country, and it had no admissible route to prosecute him for it.

He wasn't a prisoner. He was a voluntary psychiatric patient, and a voluntary

psychiatric patient who has been assessed as sane can do one thing that a prisoner

cannot.

He can discharge himself.

On the 12th of August 1986, Issei Sagawa walked out the front door of Matsuzawa

Hospital against the explicit advice of its superintendent into the Tokyo

afternoon,

a free man,

5 years and 2 months after he shot Renee in the back of the neck.

And from that day until the day he died 36 years later, he was never in custody

again, not for a night. He was never on a register. He was never monitored. He was

never required to report to anyone. The system did not fail once. It functioned

correctly twice in 2 countries, in 2 directions, and a man fell out of the gap

between them and landed on his feet. And now I need to tell you what Japan did

next, because this is the part that should make you angry, and I want you to stay

angry through it, because at the end, I'm going to ask a question about it.

They made him a star.

He wrote a memoir about the murder, Kiri no Naka, In the Fog. It was a bestseller.

He wrote more books. He was hired to write columns. He was booked on television, not

once as an object of horror, but repeatedly

as a personality.

He was interviewed by international press. He appeared in films, including

pornographic ones, cast specifically because of what he was. He worked at one

point as a food writer, a restaurant critic. Somebody at a magazine looked at

this man and thought, "That's funny. Let's give him the food column."

He was invited to comment as an expert when other killings happened. When Japan

was gripped by another notorious murder case in the 90s, publishers went to him

for his professional opinion.

He painted portraits of women and sold them. He edited an anthology of other

people's cannibal fantasies. The Rolling Stones wrote a song about him.

The Stranglers wrote a song about him.

Documentary crews flew in for decades. And he said all of this, that the public had

made him the godfather of cannibalism,

and that he was happy about it.

He was never rich from it.

That's worth saying. The money was never as good as the fame, and the fame curdled

slowly. And by the 2000s, he was living in a small flat and running out of people

who wanted to book him. In 2013, he had a stroke, a cerebral infraction. It took

most of his body. He spent his last 9 years largely bedridden, unable to care

for himself, dependent entirely on his younger brother who fed him and washed him

and moved him.

In 2017, a documentary crew filmed the 2 of them in that flat, and at one point on

camera, his brother asks him, as a brother,

as a man doing the feeding,

whether Issei

would eat him.

Sagawa doesn't answer. He looked at him,

and that's all that's on tape.

He said in his final years that the hunger had never left, not once.

Not after the arrest, not after the hospital, not after the books, not after

the stroke. He said it was still there in a body that could no longer get out of bed

to do anything about it.

He died of pneumonia in a Tokyo hospital on the 24th of November

2022.

He was 73.

There was a funeral, relatives only. No public ceremony, no press. The

announcement went out through the publishers of a memoir his brother had

written, and it was 2 paragraphs long. So

let's go back up the mountain, yeah?

I told you at the start that it was not an episode about a man escaping his

punishment. Here's what I meant.

The jikininki is not sentenced to be eaten. It's not sentenced to burn. Its

sentence is to be fed, to eat every single night forever through a throat too narrow

to pass anything so that the eating never once resolves the hunger. The appetite is

not the crime. The appetite is the sentence being served. Issei Sagawa did

the thing,

and it was quiet for about an hour,

lying on the floor of that apartment, and then it came back,

and it stayed for 41 more years in a man who could never do it again,

right through to a bedridden 73-year-old telling an interviewer that he still,

still wanted it.

He got exactly what he'd wanted his entire life,

and it fed him for one hour

out of 4 decades.

That's not him escaping.

That's a needle-thin throat.

And here's the second one.

The old priest's actual sin, go back and check it,

was not eating anybody.

He committed his sin decades before he ever tasted a corpse. His sin was that he

stood at the center of other people's worst moments and treated them as supply.

Grief arrived at his door, and he saw a living. He converted the most sacred thing

human beings do into content and took payment for it. And Japan handed Sagawa a

microphone and asked him to do that for 36 years. Talk shows, columns, a food

column. "Describe it again. Describe it for us. Here is your fee."

He spent the second half of his life monetizing a dead woman, which means he

committed the priest's sin, the actual sin, the original one,

after he'd already been turned into the monster. He served the sentence and then

went back and did the crime it was for.

And in the daylight, he looked like a man, a small, polite, well-read man in an

apartment in Yokohama, smiling for a photographer in 1992, perfectly able to

hold a conversation with no mark on him anywhere.

And now the last one, and this is the one I actually wanted to say tonight.

The jikininki cannot be arrested. There is no authority with jurisdiction over it.

No court, no prison, no executioner. Muso Kokushi,

one of the great masters of his age, standing in front of it, could not punish

it. Nobody can. That is fixed in the story, and it is fixed in this case. 2

national legal systems functioning correctly could not touch this man and

never did. There is exactly one thing in the entire tradition that ends a hungry

ghost. Somebody performs the rite. Somebody chooses to make the offering

deliberately, and in choosing, that stops the endless accidental feeding.

Sagawa was fed for 36 years, not by the courts,

by us,

by ratings, by book sales, by the crew that got on a plane, by everyone who

clicked, obviously by this episode.

So,

and I mean this, I spent 45 minutes putting an offering in front of a hungry

ghost,

and the only version of this that isn't just another meal is if the offering is

deliberate,

if it's a segaki and not a snack.

Here it is,

the rite, such as I can perform it.

Her name was Renee Hartevelt.

She was 25.

She was Dutch, and she was studying French literature at the Sorbonne.

And she spoke 4 languages, and she was tall, and she was well, and she was loved

by people who are still alive.

And on the last evening of her life, she went across to Paris to spend an hour

helping a lonely classmate with his German pronunciation, because she was the kind

of person who noticed when somebody was on their own.

That's the story.

That's the one that was worth 45 minutes. The other one was just what got in the way

of it.

The hermitage was never there.

There was only ever one old stone in the grass with moss

growing over it.

A funeral with relatives only,

no ceremony, few paragraphs.

Nobody had tended it

in a long, long time.

So before you go,

have you ever been so hungry

you couldn't think about anything else?

Have you ever wanted something you weren't allowed to want and found that refusing

it only made it stronger?

And when you imagined it, did you ever once imagine that the punishment might

already have started,

that it might not look like a cell or a court or a hand on your shoulder, that it

might just look like getting exactly what you wanted over and over forever,

with throat too narrow to pass through it?

I'm not going to answer those.

That's not what the candles are for.

That's one candle, 99 to go.

Don't be here

when the last one goes out.

So before I put this one out,

I want to name the people who keep them burning, because the room you and I have

been sitting in for the past period of time,

the dark one, the one with the stories in it,

somebody paid for the wax.

The ode at night tea titan,

there is one name at the top of this list tonight,

and there has been that name for a very, very long time,

Mato Star. Mato Star. A titan is the correct word,

because a titan isn't the loudest thing in the room. It's the thing the room is

standing on.

Mato, you've been here since before there was really a here,

before the new formats and different takes and different stories.

And everyone who has found this channel since has walked into the door that you

were already holding open.

There is nobody I would rather have in the room for this particular episode, because

you are absolutely awesome.

So thank you so much for your ongoing and undying support.

Like all good Hammer Horror films, mate, you are a classic. So here's my question

to you, Mato.

Sagawa got no final reel, no tortures, no castle fire, no stake.

He got a book deal and a food column and a warm bed at 73.

If this was a Hammer Horror film, if Hammer had been handed the last 10 minutes

of this story, what ending do you think they would write?

What are your thoughts, Mato?

Thank you so much for your support.

An epic week ahead.

And to my white tea warlords,

1st and foremost, Lesosaurus Rex,

who is, as far as I can tell, physically incapable of skipping a session at the

gym. Lesa, you have the one quality this story is genuinely about, and you have it

pointed the right way around. You understand that you become whatever you

practice. 4 years of pulling back towards Sagawa the route, 4 years under a bar

taught you something considerably better. Same law, wildly different application.

Thank you for the reps and thank you for the loyalty, which appear to be the same

discipline.

My next white tea warlord is Maya the Queen of Cats, who is the most composed

person in any room she enters and who has surrounded herself with the only creatures

on Earth that refuse to be impressed by anybody.

Maya, you bring grace to this community that I don't think you fully clock.

You're the one who lowers the temperature when it needs lowering.

Also, and I say this with love, you're the only one of us who'd have noticed

something was wrong with that seminar room in the 1st 3 minutes. Cats know,

and the people who live with cats learn.

And my final white tea warlord, Sangeetha the Seer, who called it. Whatever it was,

she called it,

and she called it early,

and she was gracious about being right, which is the rarest half of the gift.

Sangeetha, on a show entirely built out of omens and old warnings, having an actual

see in the audience is a structural advantage I don't intend to give up. Thank

you so much for your support, all 3 of you, and yourself, Mato. You are

magnificent. And to the Earl Grey enforcers, the line that holds,

every single one of you, I'm lucky to have the following. Chad Warren, Peter

Raffaelli, Just Heather, Juicebox Andy, Divided by Zero, Paige Kramer,

Not Plain Jane,

Michael Krupp, and Steve the Creeper. Thank you so much for your support. And to

everybody listening who isn't on the list, you sat in the dark with me for this

whole period of time on a story about a woman who was kind to somebody who was on

his own. Thank you for that, genuinely. Have a wonderful, wonderful night

or day.

Now, before I go, finally,

uh, I'll be on a trip for about a month,

uh, starting the end of next week. So I'm gonna be doing some edits and some

recordings in advance, and my Patreons will be getting that in advance.

Uh, once I get back from, uh, my trip, I'll be releasing them as well.

But thank you so much for your support, and I'll be back lickety-split.

Other than that, I have been your host, The Tale Teller.

Have a wonderful,

wonderful, wonderful rest of your day and night.

Bye for now.