from a larger artist’s book
entitled “Grotesque Murder in
Ogu Red-Light District Blood
Characters Carved in Master’s
Corpse Beautiful Maid Disappears Following Love Tryst (we, sada and kichi, are alone)”]
Audrey Robinovitz
On Conjuring.
Q: Why did you cut off Ishida’s penis and scrotum?
A: They were the dearest and most important part of him. His wife would have touched it when she washed the body, and I didn’t want anybody else touching it. I had to flee from that place, but if I had Ishida’s penis I thought I wouldn’t get lonely. It would be as though he were with me. I wrote “We, Sada and Kichi, are alone” on his thigh and on the bedding because after I had killed him it seemed that he had become a part of myself and I felt relieved. So when I wrote “We, Sada and Kichi, are alone” twice on him, it meant that he was completely a part of me.
–Record from the 5th Police Interrogation of Sada Abe, 1936
The facts are these: on May 18, 1936, a woman named Sada Abe who had previously worked as a prostitute and a geisha, strangled her lover, Kichizō Ishida with her obi sash before cutting off his genitals to keep inside her kimono and writing on his left thigh and stomach in blood. Observing the semiotic life of this macabre historical event made into mythic signifier for dangerous women, it becomes clear the story of Sada Abe and the symbol of the lovesick female murderess possesses some innate quality which proves equally disturbing and titillating to patriarchal popular culture at large. It is this unique and unavoidably dangerous affective power which also made the circulation of information surrounding her arrest so highly contested. Attempts to falsify her testimony were in many ways a reaction to the moral panic in Tokyo city center that followed news of her crime. In the period preceding her arrest and following news of Ishida’s murder, the city was left in a state of emergency, with pearl-clutching citizens reporting sights of Abe in contradictory places, as if she had already entered into the world of ideas: an omnipresent threat to the sanity of women and the safety of the men they love. Indeed Abe is often cited as the first modern example of ‘poison women,’ or dokufu: a Japanese phrase composed of Middle Chinese-derived roots (doku, “poison”) and (fu, “woman; wife”). In this respect she represents a woman who embodies not the correct form of feminine masochism – one that reinforces gender hierarchy and enables rape – but a less controllable form of devotional sadism, one that considers men as the object of literal castration, that places her in control of what exactly her love means.
Male sexual violence is actively sanitized and elevated within the canon precisely because it is without individual precedent. When a man strikes down a woman in the throes of orgasm, it is existential, it is his search for meaning, it is a symptom of modernity. When a woman murders a man under the same circumstances, it is revenge. What does it mean symbolically for a woman to love a man so much it drives her to murder? What might it look like to read this degree of existential agency and distance into historical records and accounts in which the fabric of patriarchal violence, of pointed and personal blame seeps into every possible discursive crack, in which the eyes of men dominate the working of our minds – researcher and subject alike?
Indeed, Abe herself wrote after her release from prison, partially in an attempt to clear her name from the common convention of usurping her life’s story to tell provocative contemplations on the nature of eroticism. Informed by varied degrees of empathy for the original historical events and inversely different degrees of obligation to pornography and the fetishisitic and often orientalist pleasure of its audiences, nearly all accounts of Abe’s life, including the very words she speaks, have been altered and presented to serve a certain hegemonic narrative. To serve the erotic lives and fantasies of men.
When Abe kills not out of hatred but out of love, the safety of masculinity as a system of power itself is put into jeopardy. This was in many ways the moment she was truly elevated to the status of ‘poison woman’ – when the public recognized her desire to kill was not borne of hysteric jealousy but a profound urge to possess the object of her desire internally, like men do.
It is at this point that the text of her life begins to unravel. It is this violent and tender contradiction that is at the center of love itself.
There is still something left.
On Desire.
In 1969 materialist feminist and french philosopher monique wittig published a novel entitled Les Guérillères.
In this novel, women of the word wage bloody war against all men,
slaughtering them to prove their biological and social superiority.
It has since been interpreted as an allegory, a call to organize around the banner of women’s liberation. but to some, it was real.
Two years before in New York, Valerie Solanas self-published a tract called the
SCUM manifesto – the society for cutting up men.
Sada Abe might be considered this movement’s Mary Wollstonecraft.
She was cutting up men nearly thirty years prior.
Before it was cool.
Shortly after Sada’s commuted release from prison,
In 1947, Jean Genet published a play called The Maids
In which two housemaids enact elaborate sadomasochistic rituals
centered around the fantasy of killing their mistress.
Their rehearsals of violence have been interpreted
by marxists against class oppression
by feminists against domesticity
by lacanians against the boundaries of the real
by dramatists against french rationalism and linguistic determinism.
Herein the common male fantasy, that violence is innate to sexual consummation, is actualized in its inverted state. accused invert Oscar Wilde's witty adage that “everything in the world is about sex except sex – sex is about power” might be revised to admit that everything in the world is about sex, except sex which is about power, and except power which is about death.
People assume that most of the literature and philosophy written on the topic of women hurting men is either done by men sublimating fetish or women looking to symbolically exorcize their trauma at the hands of men.
It is an easy and convenient lie to believe.
What is missing from this equation is love.
As the myth of Sada Abe’s life became cemented into the culture of modern Japan, she became a warning to young women. The proper mode of feminine sexuality was to feign resistance.
Just enough to demonstrate your chastity,
but not enough to prevent men from violating it.
Women must devote themselves to their husbands,
but here is the fate of someone who devotes themselves to men too much.
Over the course of Sada’s trial, it was recorded that young women with no history of delinquency and no connection to the Abe family sat in the audience. Talking amongst themselves, laughing softly, and most notably, gasping and cheering when one specific article: the evidence containing one Kichizo Ishida’s genitals, removed from his body by force, was presented as proof of her crime.
I like to imagine that one of those young girls grew up to write a SCUM manifesto of her own. maybe it happened in some farming town in rurual japan. maybe nobody ever read it, and maybe she settled down with a nice-enough man her parents found for her and maybe she had children and forgot about childish things and never looked at it again, but i think that possibility matters.
would matter. To me.
After the trial, the genitals of Kichizo Ishida were stored in a glass cloche.
They were given to Tokyo University Medical School’s pathology museum
and were kept on public display.
eventually, at some point in the 1980s,
they went the way of Sada herself
they went the way of Sada herself
and disappeared.
Maybe they went with her, wherever she went.
Maybe she still has them now.
I think that possibility matters.
would matter. to me.
Maybe she still has them now.
I think that possibility matters.
would matter. to me.
Most thought given to the legacy of Sada Abe today has been swallowed by the mouth of true crime content creation, which is the ideal place to observe the degree of moral leniency we afford to men who kill. Women write letters to them in jail. Podcasts lament the unfortunate circumstances of their childhood. No such kindness was extended to Sada. When the police questioned her about her childhood, it was to desperately search for traces of delinquency. Ways to blame her behavior on trauma or perversion – the aftereffects of men – and thus, to pacify her subversive potential.
Killing women for love is gothic,
it has precedent in literature, culture, legend –
it is tragic, but it is also expected.
Killing men for love is terrifying.
it collapses the flimsy rhetorical structure that upholds men’s claim
to rational (read: phallogocentrist) sexual force,
beyond incognizant hysterics.
to desire that does not threaten oneself but threatens others.
collapsing inwards vs exploding outwards.
like meursault killing an arab –
it operates on a level of symbolic logic:
visceral, and nietzschean
wille zur macht
to take (read: action) life (read: thing) as conceptual exercise,
as testament to the absurd.
There is no subtext to when women kill.
There is only jealousy, outrage, victimhood.
Subtlety is folded into prescriptive and condescending pathologization.
This is not to locate the buzzword of empowerment in murder.
But only to interrupt the way in which these events are digested.
To let them fester en route. intangible and raw. to reveal brief flashes of humor, of happiness, of longing, of sympathy, of sadness, of regret, of anger, of injustice, and of deep earnest feeling.
There is something at the center of wanting that endears people to Sada’s story.
Beyond yearning to monopolize the attention of a lover,
Making one’s feeling manifest.
Destructive.
Floating in small corners of the internet devoted to gore fetish and unsolved crime investigations is an image which claims to be police documentation of Ishida’s body.
I hesitate to reveal it completely.
Out of both respect for the sanctity of human life
and narrative resistance to the visual spectacle of violence.
There is beauty in not remembering.
to letting memories fade,
to blocking them out.
I can imagine that after a certain amount of time,
all that was left was love.
Fear is sharp. Sadness is heavy.
But desire is persistent.
She had surely become a different person.
Someone the world never knew.
She described her years in prison
as the closest experience to community she had ever felt.
Up until this point
she had not been part of very many communities at all.
But maybe,
they laughed together.
Maybe she told the women in prison stories
of how beautiful he was.
How he excited her in bed.
How he always paid attention to the little things.
How safe she felt by his side.
maybe they cracked jokes –
about his sex.
What became of it in the end.
how big he was.
Maybe they didn’t say anything.
Maybe she just felt like there was someone to listen.
That's what she always wanted.
but never found.
Not for her love to be understood
but for it to be heard.