A manga created by a convicted murderer and cannibal horrifies the online anime community.
As detailed in Anime Dork, Issei Sagawa, who murdered, sexually violated and cannibalized the body of a classmate while studying literature in Paris, created the manga. The city authorities caught and apprehended Sagawa when they tried to dispose of the victim’s remains. Despite being deemed legally insane and sentenced to natural life in a psychological institution, Sagawa did not serve his sentence when deported back to Japan and lived his life as a free citizen. Sagawa also profited from his crimes by writing books about them, including the aforementioned manga, which is simply titled “Sagawa.”
A YouTuber named sydsnap made a lengthy video describing the manga’s gruesome contents. Using crude drawings, Sagawa depicts every aspect of the murder in graphic detail, including dismembering the body, eating it piece by piece and doing various fetishistic acts with the different parts. He also showcases the depraved joy that committing the crime gave him as he goes into extensive detail about the texture of the flesh, how “delicious” the woman’s body and how he wishes he could use it to make various Japanese dishes, like sukiyaki. He ends the book with a drawing of his victim, a woman named Renée Hartevelt.
The contents of this book have shaken up the anime community. Although sydsnap admits to being a fan of the True Crime genre, they were nonetheless mortified by Sagawa’s manga, saying that it “scarred” them and that “it is probably the most disgusting thing I’ve ever read.” Viewers were similarly horrified, as the comment section is filled with responses like “4 seconds in and I’m out, “This guy should have been hung,” and “what the actual fuck is wrong with this person?” One particularly morbid commenter wrote, “Light Yagami was right,” referring to the iconic anime, Death Note, and Light’s core philosophy that he could fix the world by wiping out the criminal population.