The Teahouse Killing: Sada Abe's Twisted Love Story
10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories
Joe
4.9 • 638 Ratings
🗓️ 22 January 2026
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In May 1936, Tokyo geisha Sada Abe murdered her lover Kichizo Ishida through strangulation, then severed his genitals in what became Japan's most notorious crime of the Showa era. The homicide investigation revealed a twisted love affair between a former sex worker and a married restaurant owner that ended in mutilation, carving bloody inscriptions, and a three-day manhunt through Tokyo. Detectives found Abe carrying the severed body parts in her kimono, treating them like sacred relics.
This case goes way beyond tabloid shock value. You've got a woman who survived sexual trauma, disease, and the brutal exploitation of Japan's pleasure districts in the 1930s. She found something that felt like real connection, then decided if she couldn't keep it alive, she'd preserve it in the most horrifying way imaginable. The aftermath is equally wild: she walked free after just a few years, became a stage celebrity playing herself in theater productions, and later ran a bar where people lined up to be served by the woman who committed one of history's most intimate murders.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Tokyo, May 1936, a geisha walks into a police station carrying something carefully wrapped in silk inside her kimono sleeve. |
| 0:11.0 | When detectives ask what she's hiding, she produces the severed penis of her dead lover. |
| 0:17.0 | For three days, she's been wandering the streets, going to movies, staying in hotels, |
| 0:21.6 | and treating this body part like it's the man himself. |
| 0:25.5 | Her name is Sada Abe, and her crime is one of the most talked about cases in Japanese |
| 0:31.0 | crime history. So there's this moment in May 1936 where Tokyo police are dealing with full-blown mass hysteria. |
| 1:02.7 | Rumors are flying that a madwoman is loose in the Ginza district, hunting men with a kitchen knife. |
| 1:09.6 | Women in kimonos are getting stopped on the street. |
| 1:12.3 | Everyone's genuinely terrified. |
| 1:14.7 | The newspapers are running wild with speculation. |
| 1:17.5 | The reality? |
| 1:18.5 | The woman they're searching for is sitting in movie theaters watching romantic films. |
| 1:23.2 | She's browsing shops. |
| 1:24.9 | She's checking into hotels and sleeping peacefully. |
| 1:29.8 | And yes, she's carrying her dead lover's severed genitals in her purse, but she's treating them with the tenderness that |
| 1:34.8 | you'd show a photograph of someone you lost. Her name is Sada Abe. Understanding how she |
| 1:40.6 | ended up here means going back to a summer day when she was 15. |
| 1:45.0 | Tokyo in 1920 looks different from what you're probably thinking. |
| 1:49.0 | Sada grows up in the Kanda neighborhood, the working-class heart of the city. |
| 1:53.0 | Her family makes tatami mats for a living. |
| 1:56.0 | She's the seventh of eight kids. |
| 1:58.0 | Her mother has artistic ambitions that don't match their social class, |
... |
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