Sada Abe: A Sex Extremist Who Carried Her Lover’s Genitals
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On the afternoon of 20 May 1936, a police inspector walked into a Tokyo inn room. Suspicious of the alias under which Sada Abe was registered, he entered a room. She then said,
“You’re looking for Sada Abe, right? Well, that’s me. I am Sada Abe.”
When the inspector was not convinced with her, she took out the proof of murder; the mutilated genitalia of her lover. When she was asked that why she killed her own lover, Ishida, she replied,
“I felt attached to Ishida’s penis and thought that only after taking leave from it quietly could I then die. I unwrapped the paper holding them and gazed at his penis and scrotum. I put his penis in my mouth and even tried to insert it inside me… It didn’t work however though I kept trying and trying. Then, I decided that I would flee to Osaka, staying with Ishida’s penis all the while. In the end, I would jump from a cliff on Mount Ikoma while holding on to his penis.”
This is how Sada Abe committed her first and only crime, which was a result of necrophilia. Read on to know her entire story!
The Early Life of Sada.
Sada Abe was born in 1905. Her mother encouraged her to sing and play the shamisen, not for the sake of classical artistic endeavor, but rather to be in close contact with geisha and prostitutes. At the time, geisha were viewed as glamorous celebrities, so Abe followed the image of a geisha by skipping school for these lessons and started wearing stylish make-up for the purpose. As her parents began sending her out alone, she developed friendships with other similar independent teenagers. During an outing with them, she was raped by one of her acquaintances. She was just fifteen at the time. Sada’s parents supported her, but she was a difficult teenager, becoming more irresponsible and uncontrollable. Consequently, she was sold to a geisha house in Yokohama in 1922.
The oldest sister of Sada, Toku Abe, testified that Sada had always dreamed of becoming a geisha. According to Sada, her father punished her for her promiscuity by making her a geisha. Geisha’s world was more frustrating and disappointing because, to be a true star, one must study art and music from an early age. Because Sada wasn’t trained from birth, she became a low-ranking geisha whose primary function was to provide sexual services. For five years, she worked in this job but ended up contracting syphilis.
The Early Thirties of Sada Abe.
After Sada contracted syphilis, she dropped her services as a geisha and started working as a prostitute in Osaka’s famous Tobita brothel district. Soon, she gained a great reputation as a troublemaker as she used to steal money from her clients and attempted to leave the brothel several times. However, every time she attempted to leave, she was tracked down by legal prostitution systems. But eventually, she succeeded in escaping from them and finally started working as a waitress. Not satisfied with her wages, she began working in prostitution again, but this time in unlicensed brothels in 1932. But, Sada was arrested in October 1934 during a police raid on the brothel where she worked. However, she was released due to the good connections of Kinnosuke Kasahara, a friend of the brothel owner. When he found that she had no debts, he made her his mistress with Abe’s consent. Sada was provided with a house and money by Kasahara on December 20, 1934.
In his statement to the police, he remembered,
“She was really strong, a real powerful one. Even though I am pretty jaded, she was enough to astound me. She wasn’t satisfied unless we did it two, three, or four times a night. To her, it was unacceptable unless I had my hand on her private parts all night long… At first, it was great, but after a couple of weeks I got a little exhausted.”
But their relationship ended when Kasahara refused to leave his wife for her. As a result, Sada then left for Nagoya.
Kasahara ended his testimony by saying,
“She is a slut and a whore. And as what she has done makes clear, she is a woman whom men should fear.”
Likewise, Sada gave her statement on Kasahara saying,
“He didn’t love me and treated me like an animal. He was the kind of scum who would then plead with me when I said that we should break up.”
Meeting Ishida.
Sada took a job as a waitress in Ishida’s restaurant, and during that time, he was married but an inveterate womanizer. It wasn’t long enough that they started meeting secretly with each other, and started having frenzied sex sessions anywhere they could. Sada was insatiable, as even doctors suggested that she might have a medical condition when she met Ishida.
Sooner, Sada and Ishida started pushing their boundaries so obsessively that they began finding new ways to pleasure each other. One time, Sada throttled him with a sash cord to an extensive side of insensibility that his flow of blood traveled all the way to his penis, ballooning it and producing staggering and heartstopping orgasms.
One time, they met for a pre-arranged sexual encounter at a teahouse where they had sex for four days. On 27th April, they moved to another teahouse where they continued drinking and having sex, sometimes accompanied by the geisha’s singing. They even continued it as maids entered for service’s sake. When the next day, they separated to return to their normal lives, Sada began drinking and got agitated. She didn’t want him to go back to his wife.
Then, on May 11, 1936, she brought some sushi along with a kitchen knife. She described the incident of meeting Ishida that night as,
“I pulled the kitchen knife out of my bag and threatened him as had been done in the play I had seen, saying, ‘Kichi, you wore that kimono just to please one of your favorite customers. You bastard, I’ll kill you for that.’ Ishida was startled and drew away a little, but he seemed delighted with it all…”
The Murder Night and Weird Fantasies.
On the evening of 16 May 1936, Sada and Ishida had their sex encounter again, where they spent two nights. However, during this time, while they were having intercourse, Sada put the knife into the base of Ishida’s penis to make sure that he never play around with another woman. Ishida took it as a joke and laughed at it.
One time, Sada used her obi sash to cut off Ishida’s breathing during orgasm, which both of them enjoyed and continued for two additional hours. Once Sada removed her sash from his throat and stopped strangulation, Ishida’s face didn’t return to normal so she gave him 30 tablets of a sedative Calmotin to soothe his pain.
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.”
However, he was just making it a fun talk. But at around 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. Then she cut off his penis and testicles and wrapped in a paper parcel to keep it in her purse. The naked body of Ishida had a carving on his thigh, which contained the carving,
“Sada, Kichi Futari-kiri,”
which meant Sada and Kichi, inseparable forever. She also carved Sada on his left arm.
When asked by police why she murdered her lover, she said,
“I loved him so much, I wanted him all to myself… I knew that if I killed him no other woman could ever touch him again, so I killed him.”
About cutting genitals, she further added,
“They belonged to someone I loved. Everything of Ishida’s had become mine.”
Trials and After Life.
After the police found her in the hotel’s inn, she was interrogated for around eight hours. In the trials, she was sentenced to six years imprisonment, but she was released under an amnesty in 1941. Then she moved away from Tokyo under a different name and got married. In 1947, however, she was rediscovered by a journalist, who also wrote a book, The Sex Confessions of Sada on her, which was then a bestseller. But subsequently, Sada put a defamation case on his book and wrote her own book, where she described her doing as,
“total love… for her to cut off his member as a keepsake was the ultimate feminine act.”
The last time Ishida’s genitals were seen was at a post-war department store exhibition, and the full biography of Sada even appeared in the movie, In the Realm of the Senses.
Bibliography.
100 Most Infamous Criminals: Murder, Mayhem and Madness by Jo Durden Smith.
