Today's sensational, yet truly fucked up fact!

Sada Abe (阿部 定) was a Japanese woman who was thrown out of her home as a teenager after losing her virginity to a rapist. She became a low-ranking geisha whose main duties were to provide sex and worked in the prostitution industry for several years. In February 1936, at the urging of her lover Goro Omiya, she began an apprenticeship at a restaurant owned by Kichizo Ishida (石田 吉蔵), 42. When Abe joined his restaurant, Ishida was known as a womanizer who did little in the way of running the restaurant, which was managed mostly by his wife. Not long after she began work at the restaurant, Ishida began making advances towards Abe. Omiya had never satisfied Abe sexually, and she gave in to Ishida. In mid-April, Ishida and Abe initiated their sexual relationship in the restaurant, to the accompaniment of a romantic ballad sung by one of the restaurant’s geishas. On April 23, 1936 Abe and Ishida met for a pre-arranged sexual encounter at a teahouse — the contemporary equivalent of a love hotel. Planning only a short “fling”, the couple stayed in bed continuously for four days. On the night of April 27, 1936, they moved to another teahouse in the distant neighborhood of Futako Tamagawa. Here they continued to drink and have sex. Ishida did not return to the restaurant until the morning of May 8, 1936. Of Ishida, Abe later said, “It is hard to say exactly what was so good about Ishida. But it was impossible to say anything bad about his looks, his attitude, his skill as a lover, the way he expressed his feelings. I had never met such a sexy man.”

After they separated, Abe became agitated and began drinking excessively. She claimed that with Ishida she knew love for the first time in her life, and the thought that Ishida was back with his wife made her jealous. On May 9, 1936 she attended a play in which a geisha attacks her lover with a large knife. After seeing this, Abe decided to threaten Ishida with a knife at their next meeting. She pulled the knife out of her bag and threatened him as in the play. Ichida was startled, but seemed delighted with the prop. Ishida and Abe began another marathon lovemaking session. During their lovemaking this time, Abe put the knife to the base of Ishida’s penis, and said she would make sure he would never play around with another woman. Ishida laughed at this. Two nights into this bout of sex, Abe began choking Ishida, and he told her to continue, saying that this increased his pleasure. She had him do it to her as well. On the evening of the May 16, 1936, Abe used her obi sash to cut off Ishida’s breathing during orgasm, and they both enjoyed it. They repeated this for two more hours. Once Abe stopped the strangulation, Ishida’s face became distorted, and would not return to its normal appearance. Ishida took 30 tablets of a sedative called Calmotin to try to soothe his pain. According to Abe, as Ishida started to doze, he told her, “You’ll put the cord around my neck and squeeze it again while I’m sleeping, won’t you… If you start to strangle me, don’t stop, because it is so painful afterward.” Abe commented that she wondered if he had wanted her to kill him, but on reflection decided he must have been joking.

About 2 a.m. on the morning of May 18, 1936, as Ishida was asleep, Abe wrapped her sash twice around his neck and strangled him to death. She later told police, “After I had killed Ishida I felt totally at ease, as though a heavy burden had been lifted from my shoulders, and I felt a sense of clarity.” After laying with Ishida’s body for a few hours, she next severed his genitalia with the kitchen knife, wrapped them in a magazine cover, and kept them until her arrest three days later. With the blood, she wrote, "二人っきり定吉蔵" (Sada, Kichi, just the two of us) on Ishida’s left thigh, and on a bed sheet. She then carved “ 定” (Sada) into his left arm. After putting on Ishida’s underwear, she left the inn at about 8 a.m., telling the staff not to disturb Ishida. When asked why she had severed Ishida’s genitalia, Abe replied, “Because I couldn’t take his head or body with me. I wanted to take the part of him that brought back to me the most vivid memories.”

After leaving the inn, Abe met Goro Omiya. She repeatedly apologized to him, but Omiya, unaware of the murder, assumed that she was apologizing for having taken another lover. Abe’s apologies were for the damage to his political career that she knew his association with her was bound to cause. On May 19, 1936, the newspapers picked up the story. Omiya’s career was ruined, and Abe’s life was under intense public scrutiny from that point onwards. Abe was arrested and interrogated over eight sessions. The interrogating officer was struck by Abe’s demeanor when asked why she had killed Ishida. “Immediately she became excited and her eyes sparkled in a strange way.” Her answer was: “I loved him so much, I wanted him all to myself. But since we were not husband and wife, as long as he lived he could be embraced by other women. I knew that if I killed him no other woman could ever touch him again, so I killed him…..” When the details of the crime were made public, rumors began to circulate that Ishida’s penis was of an extraordinary size. However, the police officer who interrogated Abe after her arrest denied this, saying, “Ishida’s was just average. [Abe] told me, ‘Size doesn’t make a man in bed. Technique and his desire to please me were what I liked about Ishida.’” After her arrest, Ishida’s penis and testicles were moved to Tokyo University Medical School’s pathology museum. The were put on public display not long after the end of World War II, but they have since disappeared. On December 21, 1936 Abe was convicted of murder in the second degree and mutilation of a corpse. Though the prosecution demanded ten years, and she was hoping for the death penalty, Abe was sentenced to six years in prison. She was released, exactly five years after the murder, on May 17, 1941.

This case was also made into a motion picture in 1976, called 愛のコリーダ (In the Realm of the Senses). I'm going to see if I can find a copy, watch it and then I'll blog about it at a later date.