Almost from the moment he arrived in Japan, Issei Sagawa’s legal status remained murky. While the Japanese police wanted to place new charges to ensure that he would stay in prison, they were stymied because the Paris police force refused to share their case file. This meant that they had no evidence to lay charges and, since the French government had already deported him, had no legal reason to keep him in prison. As a result, authorities had no choice but to allow Sagawa's parents to place him in the Metropolitan Matsuzawa Hospital in Tokyo as a voluntary patient.
But Sagawa had apparently learned his lesson from dealing with the French psychiatric system and courts. As soon as he entered the hospital, he began to change his story about how Renee Harteveldt died. This included denying that he murdered Renee but rather insisting that she had been accidentally killed when his rifle "fell down." He also told police and doctors that an unnamed Algerian friend had been the one to cut up the body and that he was just a victim of circumstance.
While this probably didn't fool the police or the hospital doctors, it was enough for Sagawa's parents. Still dealing with the notoriety surrounding their son's hospitalization, they demanded his release after he only spent fifteen months inside. While the doctors who dealt with Sagawa emphatically opposed his release, they had no legal ground to keep him hospitalized and were in no position to fight the expensive lawyers hired by the Sagawa family. It probably didn't help that the hospital doctors had already declared Sagawa to be sane despite diagnosing him with a personality disorder that likely made him a danger to other women. Despite this warning, Issei Sagawa was released into the care of his parents on the grounds that he had never been indicted in Japan and that there wasn't enough evidence to hold him. Though there were the inevitable recriminations with French authorities blaming Japanese authorities for his release (and vice-versa), there was no way of reversing this decision and Sagawa has been a free man ever since. This included allowing him to reapply for a passport so that he could travel to other countries (with the definite exception of France).
Almost inevitably, Issei Sagawa's notoriety, not to mention how he was able to "get away" with killing and cannibalizing a woman, made him the centre of a bizarre media cult, both in Japan and in Europe. Even while he was still in Le Sante Prison, he began corresponding with Juro Kawa, a Japanese playwright who later wrote a novel based on the letters exchanged. The novel, Sagawa-kun kara 
By the time 1983 came around, Sagawa's media popularity was at its peak with the Rolling Stones releasing their new album, Under Cover, that same year. The album featured the song, Too Much Blood, about Sagawa's murder and his media cult. With lyrics such as "A friend of mine was this Japanese, he had a girlfriend in Paris/He tried to date her, in six months eventually she said yes/You know he took her to his apartment, cut off her head/put the rest of her body in the refrigerator, ate her piece by piece/You don't believe me truth is stranger than fiction", the song helped make Sagawa even more famous than ever. Two other popular songs about Renee Harteveldt's murder have since come out.
Issei Sagawa's odd media celebrity meant frequent guest appearances on different television shows and a small movie part in an otherwise forgettable exploitation film (he played a sadistic voyeur). He also went on to write four more books, one of them titled "Extremely Intimate Fantasies of Beautiful Girls" as well as a brief stint as a restaurant reviewer for the Japanese magazine Spa.
But it was the numerous media interviews that really allowed him to revel in his celebrity status. During one memorable interview for Vice magazine in 2009, he openly admitted that he still had cannibalistic urges. "The desire to eat people becomes so intense around June, when women start wearing less and showing more skin," he said. "Just today, I saw a girl with a really nice derrière on my way to the train station. When I see things like that, I think about wanting to eat someone again before I die."
But Sagawa's notoriety eventually caught up with him. Once the demand for his writing dried up, he soon found himself completely unemployable. In that same Vice interview, he complained about how difficult it was for him to make a living when he was widely known as a murderer and a cannibal. After his parents died in 2005, he was prevented from attending their funeral though he managed to pay off their creditors before being forced to subsist on welfare for a time. Following a cerebral infarction in 2013 that left him partially paralyzed, he was placed under the full-time care of his brother, Jun.
Issei Sagawa's paralysis hasn't kept him completely out of the public eye, however. In 2017, filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel released a bizarre documentary titled Caniba which highlighted the strange love-hate relationship between Issei and Jun Sagawa. Along with Issei lovingly describing Renee Hartevelt's death (her name was included in the cast roster ), the film also included interviews with both Sagawas. There was also graphic scenes of Jun Sagawa self-mutilating, apparently due to the long-term effect of serving as his brother's caretaker (the stigma surrounding his name prevented him from ever marrying). Released to mixed reviews in film festivals in Toronto and Venice (where many audience members reportedly walked out), Caniba is definitely not to all tastes though Issei Sagawa seemed to enjoy the opportunity to perform for an audience once more.
While Issei Sagawa is hardly the only murderer to gain celebrity status, he is certainly one of the most memorable. That a self-confessed cannibal/murderer could parlay his crime into a successful media career (at least for a little while) is an uncomfortable reminder about the strange nature of celebrity in modern society.
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