Excerpt from "Interview with a Cannibal," by VICE.

Issei Sagawa (known as the "Kobe Cannibal") was a Japanese student who murdered, raped, and devoured a Dutch student in Paris in 1981, and who subsequently lived freely as a celebrity in Japan.

On June 13, 1981, Issei Sagawa, a 32-year-old literature student, invited Renée Hartevelt, a 25-year-old Dutch classmate from the Sorbonne, to his apartment in Paris under the pretext of translating poetry.
Sagawa shot Hartevelt in the neck with a rifle, raped her, and ate parts of her body over the course of three days; he then attempted to dispose of her remains, packed in suitcases, in the Bois de Boulogne park, where he was seen by witnesses and subsequently arrested by French police.

French psychiatric experts declared Sagawa legally insane and unfit to stand trial, which led to his admission to a psychiatric facility rather than a prison.
In 1984, he was deported back to Japan, where psychiatrists at Matsuzawa Hospital in Tokyo evaluated Sagawa and concluded that he was of sound mind, meaning that Japanese authorities lacked a legal basis to commit him or convict him based on sealed French case files and procedural loopholes, so he was released in 1986.

Sagawa capitalized on his notoriety in Japan for decades, writing autobiographical books (including “In the Fog”), appearing in documentaries, creating manga and pornography, and working as a media personality.

Issei Sagawa died of pneumonia on November 24, 2022, at the age of 73.