Issei Sagawa: Excuse Me For Living (1993)

21/11/1993

Overview

A filmed biography of Issei Sagawa, the Japanese student who shot his Dutch girlfriend, cut her up with a meat carver and boiled the remains. He then ate her. Several months later he was declared insane. While in a psychiatric hospital in France he wrote an account of his crime `In the Fog' which sold 200,000 copies. The French released him in 1984 on the condition that he remained in a mental hospital in Japan. One year later the Japanese hospital released him. Since then he has written five books on crime and is a minor celebrity lionised by the avant garde. Sagawa speaks extensively in the programme and reads passages from his books.