The Kimono’s Crimson Secret:
The Legend of Sada Abe
by M.P. Pellicer | Noir Notebook
Before she became a symbol of “erotic-grotesque” obsession, Sada Abe was the youngest surviving child of a respectable Tokyo family. Born in 1905 to tatami mat makers, her path toward the macabre began early. Her mother doted on her, encouraging lessons in the shamisen—arts more associated with the willow world of geishas than classical society.
Sada Abe (1905-1992 or after) was the seventh of eight children of Shigeyoshi and Katsu Abe. Only four of the children survived into adulthood.
Sada’s parents were known for being honest, but her siblings did not follow in their footsteps. Her brother Shintaro, a womanizer, ran away with his parents’ money after his marriage. Her sister Teruko was known to have taken several lovers. As punishment, her father sent her to work in a brothel. He brought her back home, and her excursion into prostitution was not considered a hindrance to marriage for those of the Abes’ class at the time, and she soon married.
One hundred years ago in Japan, families used to punish promiscuous daughters by sending them to work in brothels. In the medieval period in Japan, casual sex and promiscuity were once embraced among Buddhists, especially among people of the lower classes. The Buddhist mythology has a story about Japan’s creation, which involves two gods having sex with each other and creating Japan. This became part of the justification for selling girls into prostitution.
Sada’s parents were preoccupied with problems caused by their older children, and Sada was left to her own devices. She fell in with the wrong friends.
At the age of 14, during one of her outings with this group, Abe was raped by one of her acquaintances, a Keio University student. Abe’s parents initially appeared to support her, but soon changed their response, and, claiming that Abe had become irresponsible and uncontrollable, they sold her to a geisha house in Yokohama in 1922.
While Sada maintained that she was being punished for her promiscuous behavior, her sister would state that she had been perfectly willing. Becoming an accomplished geisha was a mark of distinction for Japanese women of the time, and Sada had often expressed her wish to pursue this lifestyle.
She soon learned that famous Geishas were those who had apprenticed since childhood; she was relegated to a low-ranking Geisha, providing sex for clients. After five years in this role, she contracted syphilis, which forced her to undergo regular physical examinations to keep working at licensed brothels. At this time, there was no cure for this disease since penicillin was not introduced until the 1940s in Japan.
Abe left for Osaka’s famous Tobita brothel district, but after stealing money from clients and attempting to run away from the brothel, she developed a reputation as a troublemaker. The organized, legal prostitution system tracked her down each time she left since she was indentured to them, but after two years, she escaped their clutches and started to work as a waitress. The wages didn’t measure up, and soon she returned to prostituting herself in the unlicensed brothels of Osaka in 1932.
Two years later, she was arrested when police raided the brothel. She became the mistress of Kinnosuke Kasahara, who set up a house for her and provided income as well.
Later, he would testify about their relationship thus:
She was really strong, a real powerful one. Even though I am pretty jaded, she was enough to astound me. She wasn’t satisfied unless we did it two, three, or four times a night. To her, it was unacceptable unless I had my hand on her private parts all night long… At first it was great, but after a couple of weeks I got a little exhausted. She is a slut and a whore. And as what she has done makes clear, she is a woman whom men should fear.”
Abe wanted Kasahara to leave his wife and marry her, but he said no. He gave her the same answer when she asked if she could take another lover. Her solution was to leave for Nagoya.
For years, Sada drifted through licensed and unlicensed brothels, surviving syphilis, theft, and predatory lovers, searching for a devotion that the cold economics of the sex trade could not provide.
The Fatal Obsession: Sada and Kichizō
In February 1936, Sada began working as an apprentice at the Yoshidaya restaurant in an attempt at starting a new life. This was how she met Kichizo Ishida. Despite being the owner of the restaurant, it was really his wife who ran the business. The 42-year-old Ishida was a frequent womanizer who was bored with his marriage, and it didn’t take long for him to notice his free-spirited apprentice was a match for his own insatiable appetites.
Their affair was a descent into total isolation. In April 1936, they vanished into a series of “tea houses”—the era’s love hotels—staying in bed for days at a time. Sada later remarked that she had never known such a “sexy man.” But with love came a suffocating jealousy. She could not bear the thought of Ishida returning to his wife.
The Night of May 18
The couple began experimenting with erotic asphyxiation, using silk sashes to heighten their pleasure. On the night of May 18, while Ishida slept under the influence of sedatives, Sada wrapped her obi (sash) around his neck and strangled him to death.
The violence did not end with his final breath. Seeking a permanent piece of her lover, Sada used a kitchen knife to sever his genitalia. She wrapped the trophy in a magazine and carried it in her kimono for three days. On his thigh, she wrote in blood: “We, Sada and Kichizō Ishida, are alone.”
“Abe Sada Panic”
The discovery of Ishida’s body ignited a national frenzy. As Sada wandered Tokyo—visiting cinemas and drinking beer while clutching her grisly memento—the newspapers dubbed the manhunt “Abe Sada Panic.”
She spent the day writing farewell letters to a friend as she planned to commit suicide. One week after the murder, she practiced necrophilia with what was left of her lover.
“I felt attached to Ishida’s penis and thought that only after taking leave from it quietly could I then die. I unwrapped the paper holding them and gazed at his penis and scrotum. I put his penis in my mouth and even tried to insert it inside me… It didn’t work, however, though I kept trying and trying. Then, I decided that I would flee to Osaka, staying with Ishida’s penis all the while. In the end, I would jump from a cliff on Mount Ikoma while holding on to his penis.”
When police finally cornered her at a Shinagawa inn, she did not cower.
“You’re looking for Sada Abe, right? Well, that’s me,” she told the detectives. To prove her identity, she revealed the contents of her parcel.
Trial and Transformation
The public sat mesmerized by her testimony. She claimed she killed him not out of malice, but out of a love so possessive that death was the only way to keep him.
Abe Sada’s mental evaluation by Tsuneo Muramatsu, a lecturer at the Faculty of Medicine at Tokyo Imperial University (currently the University of Tokyo ), submitted to the trial, concluded that “a congenital abnormality in personality was greatly encouraged by the childhood environment, resulting in hysterical characteristics both mentally and physically.” It was found that she also had sadism and hyposexual hypersensitivity ( perversion ).
The court treated her with strange leniency, sentencing her to six years, instead of the ten dictated by law. Abe Sada asked for the death penalty. She left prison in 1941 after serving only five years. Her story had already passed from newsprint into folklore.
Kichizo Ishida’s wife was devastated by her husband’s death but managed to keep the restaurant going, which ironically profited from the publicity of the case. Even the inn where the murder had taken place attracted eager customers, with couples asking for the room where Ishida had been killed.
Despite the romanticized spin given to Abe Sada’s murderous actions as borne out of possessive love, was there not a motive of expediency and desperation?
She was 31 years old in a culture where prostitutes and courtesans rarely worked into old age, due to strict age limits and the mortality rates.
From 1600 to 1952, the government tried to prevent young girls (and boys) from becoming prostitutes. They enforced a minimum age of 15 and a maximum age of 27.
Courtesans were considered mature at 19, veterans at 21, and typically retired by 23. Many died by their early 20s due to malnutrition, suicide, and the toxic lead makeup used for beauty.
Women who reached the end of their service could only gain freedom through marriage to a wealthy patron or retirement. This career was viewed as a fleeting youth.
The Jokanji Temple in Tokyo is sometimes referred to as the “Throw Away Temple” because it was the burial ground for impoverished prostitutes who died in the Yoshiwara district. Brothel workers would take her body, wrap it in a cheap rush mat, carry her out, and dump her at the gates of the nearby Jokanji temple. In all, an estimated 25,000 women were thusly interred.
The Living Ghost
Once freed, Abe’s stable lifestyle vanished. She left prison without any real income, and she went to live with her sister and brother-in-law for a time, but wartime rationing forced her to support herself.
Even living under an alias, Sada found that public fascination with her case made starting a new life impossible. Under the name “Yoshii Masako,” she went to work as a maid but was fired when her employers learned her true identity. A “serious man” then asked her to become his mistress, and she reluctantly accepted. This relationship ended after several years when his family learned who she really was.
In the post-war era, Sada Abe’s image shifted. No longer just a “poison woman,” she became a symbol of individual freedom against the backdrop of Japan’s rigid, pre-war morality. She wrote an autobiography in 1948, performed in stage plays about her life, and eventually worked at a Tokyo pub.
There, she leaned into her infamy. When she entered the room, male patrons would jokingly cover their crotches and shout, “Hide the knives!” Sada would respond with a haughty, terrifying silence before pouring their drinks.
Prostitution was outlawed in Japan in 1957.
Sada disappeared from public view in 1970.
The 1976 erotic classic, In The Realm of the Senses, is probably the best-known of the three films made about Sada’s life. The film’s explicit sex scenes caused it to be banned or censored in countries around the world.
After Sada dropped from sight, mystery still swirled around her absence.
When the film was being planned, director Nagisa Ōshima sought out Abe and, after a long search, found her, her hair shorn, in a nunnery in Kansai.
According to Kagero Mutsuki, around 1992, the cannibal murderer Issei Sagawa somehow tracked down Abe to a nursing home in Izu City, Shizuoka Prefecture.
A quiet end for a woman whose name once stood for the ultimate, bloody sacrifice of love. Nothing was ever confirmed about where or when she died, and there is no official death date.
The fate of her “trophy”—once presented as evidence at court, and then kept in a medical museum—remains unknown, lost in the fires of history.
