William Johnston's book Geisha, Harlot, Strangler, Star: A Woman, Sex, and Morality in Modern Japan (2004) is a fascinating book in several ways. Sada Abe's story is extremely famous and has been written about many many times since it occurred in 1936. Most of my knowledge comes from Nagisa Oshima's film, In The Realm Of The Senses (1976). It is a enthralling analysis of Abe's life history, observations about modern Japanese society, and police interrogations and justice. It seems that she was spoiled by her parents early. And later in her adolescence she was turned out of the house while they were fighting with her older siblings about the legacy of the family tatami mat making business. At this time she suffered rape from an acquaintance in her neighborhood who was older and went to Waseda. She told her mother who approached the family who refused to acknowledge the incident. Abe suffered from this thinking that she could not lead a conventional since she was no longer a virgin and wouldn't be considered marriage material despite her mother's advice to forget about and not disclose this information. She started to steal money from her parents and hangout with a bad crowd and looking for fun in Asakusa. Later after they moved to Saitama, she took up with a neighbor and was living fast, so her father decided to sell her to a brothel-supposedly to let her get it out of her system then have her return to the family. Johnston states that this was a common practice among middle class families with wild daughters, which seems absolutely shocking to me. This was a turning point for Abe, who vowed to never return to her family after this.
The life she lead after this was dizzily chaotic life of going from one brothel to another getting large loans that have to be paid back, escapes from exploitative tea houses, tawdry affairs, and the contraction of syphilis at different times throughout her life. She finally tries to go straight, but is unable to for a number of reasons: lack of education, a taste for high living, exploitation by others, her high sex drive, etc. The whole system of running up high bills and escaping or paying a fraction seems inefficient and unlikely to me. At the point she has run off with the man she would kill, Kichi Ishida, she is getting her money from a kindly City Hall official from Nagoya. All of her many dealings with men suggest that most of them were keeping mistresses and/or playing around, and many wives were tolerating this or turning a blind eye-perhaps due to the lack of "love marriages" and the dearth of arranged marriages? Essentially, she was obsessed with Ishida whom she found irresistible and wanted to dominate/control him and stop him from having sex with other women or his wife and be hers alone. They were engaging in rough sex by strangling each other during climax for a more intense effect-has this been done since the karma sutra? This led to her strangling Ishida. Then she severed his genitals after strangling him as a sort of memento. There would be no question of double suicide or running off together-his wife ran a prosperous restaurant in Nakano and he had two children. The police testimony is a fascinating document that Johnston draws from and has included in its full form. She is given an eight year sentence and is dogged continually about the incident until she disappears from public view. The genitals of Ishida were given to university and also mysteriously disappeared. It is easy to see how this story has captured the attentions of millions since its occurrence.
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