Abe Sada, the real geisha who inspired the famous film “The Empire of the Senses”

I am the one you are looking for begins with the news item that shook Japan in 1936 and made Abe Sada famous. A man’s naked body is found in a Tokyo hotel room. His penis was cut off. On the victim’s thigh, we wrote, in his blood: “Sada, Kichi, together forever”.

Resonant news story

Then aged 31, this low-ranking geisha turned prostitute was arrested a little later by the police, after having wandered around the city, with the attributes of her lover, and contemplating suicide. In imperial and militarist Japan, which is preparing to go to war in China, the news makes a lot of noise and serves as an outlet for an anguished population.

Sentenced to six years in prison, Abe Sada will publish her autobiography and perform in a traveling stage production inspired by her life (titled Showa Ichidai Onnaeither A woman from the Showa period), before leading a more discreet life and working in a bar. The exact date of his death is unknown, which is estimated to have been after 1971.

Arnaud Guigue’s non-fiction novel is intended to be a detailed and faithful account of the events (Sada wrote in the 1950s, the police file was published in 1936), even if the author allows himself interpretations of the feelings of Sada. He extrapolates, for example, that she would still have been alive in 1975 and seen Oshima’s film.

Fascination continue

Through Sada, I am the one you are looking for is, also, the portrait of a certain feminine condition in Japan, after the infanticidal mothers depicted in the recent The Midori Affair by journalist Karyn Nishimura-Poupée. Like the movie Onoda, 10,000 nights in the junglesigned by the Frenchman Arthur Harari, based on the story of Hirō Onoda (the last Japanese soldier to have capitulated), these works testify to the fascination that the country continues to exert in Europe.

After tests, relating to stay chronicles, very fashionable, I am the one you are looking for is the first novel in the Komon collection. Created by the French tour operator Japan Experience and the publishing house Les Arènes, it aims to “create a bridge with Japan, its people and its daily life”. We will let the Japanese decide whether Sada is the one they would seek out to create such bridges.

⇒ I am the one you are looking for | Roman | Arnaud Guigue | The Arena, 192 pp., €15