Issei Sagawa served time in a French jail for the murder of the Dutch student Renée Hartevelt, a classmate at the Sorbonne Academy in Paris. In June 11, 1981, Sagawa was studying avant garde literature. He invited her to dinner under the pretense of literary conversation. Upon her arrival, he shot her in the neck with a rifle while she sat with her back to him at a desk, then began to carry out his plan of eating her. She was selected because of her health and beauty, those characteristics Sagawa believed he lacked. In interviews, Sagawa describes himself as a "weak, ugly and small man" and claims that he wanted to "absorb her energy." — Wikipedia
I could not sleep. My ears woke me up around four in the morning. They stung and itched and — not sure why, exactly — made me think of how awful it must have been for Lon Chaney Jr. to sit through his Wolf Man makeup sessions with Jack Pierce. But unlike Pierce's painstaking application of yak hair, strand by strand, I had to endure a painful, heavyweight tag-team electrolysis smackdown on my ears' hair follicles, earlier that day. In a perversely skewed Newtonian Law of Equilibrium, my ears started growing hair when my scalp stopped doing so.
I headed to the kitchen for an early breakfast. Not surprisingly, I found Zombos paging through Weekly Weird Asia World News as he sipped a hot chocolate. His insomnia, aided by Zimba's snoring, usually kicked in around this time of the morning. Chef Machiavelli stood by the stove, flipping one of his succulent pancake omelettes — with oyster filling, judging by the aroma. I flashed a deuce sign for him to make another one and joined Zombos at the table. He poured a cup of caffè corretto for me and slid the Sambuca over, but I reached for the cognac instead: I needed something stronger to quell the sturm und drang in my ears.
I picked up Weekly Weird Asia's Living section and thumbed through it. "This is interesting. Here's an article on Issei Sagawa, Japan's Celebrity Cannibal. He's opening a sushi bar. My, my... guy goes and eats his classmate, gets off on a technicality, and becomes a minor celebrity. Tastes like tuna, he said."
"I giapponesi sono pazzeschi," said Chef Machiavelli, serving the omelettes. He snatched the ketchup bottle from my hand before I could uncap it. I reached for the pepper and waited for him to nod okay. He nodded.
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