[The Castration Sonata] on the first woman in popular culture to "Bobbitt" a lover

            It is the greatest nightmare any man can ever hope never to bare; and that is the act of castration.

            Americans specifically are all aware of the name of Lorena Bobbitt, the Ecuadorian-born woman who married a man named John Bobbitt once immigrating into the United States. After continuous sexual assaults against her, Lorena, having allegedly been traumatized and terrified of her husband, who was cleared of sexual assault charges against her in 1993, waited for him to fall into a deep sleep and on the night of June 23, 1993, severed his penis off. Lorena was forced by the responding authorities to recover the penis, which, fortunately (not really fortunate) clean margins of cut allowed surgeons to reattach John’s penis. Lorena was found not guilty by reason of mental disease and defect after numerous testimonies on John’s ongoing domestic abuse against Lorena and she was ordered to spend 45 days in a Psychiatric hospital. John would ironically go on to become a porn star, shooting a pornographic filmed entitled “Pieces of Bobbitt.”

            Despite the numerous media coverage and the popular culture surrounding Lorena’s very name, Lorena wasn’t the first woman popularized by her vicious castration of a lover.

            Sada Abe was a former sex worker and geisha, born in 1905 in the Empire of Japan. Growing up in a house with eight children, Sada was a wild child in an era where wild children were considered extremely unfit to be socially acceptable. Her father, unable to shoulder her acting out and the unending rumors of her numerous lovers, sent her to work in a brothel, possibly in a harsh parental lesson on how behaviour can shape a woman’s future and not in the best of ways. It is of note that Japan has always had a sort of flagrant assault against women through centuries of misogyny; for example, a woman being left-handed gave a man grounds for a divorce from her, men wouldn’t take a woman as a wife if she hadn’t at one point been trained to pleasure men in a systemic traditional group houses aimed to further the male agenda to control women and Sushi itself, even today in certain places, is almost entirely prepared by men on the grounds that women hands are too warm. Under this climate, Sada became a victim of the wild errors so common in adolescence, paying the price with shame, the three-hole wonder to countless predators adding to the never-ending abuse against her person.

            Sada worked for five years in the harsh environments of a brothel, contracting Syphilis, Sada, perhaps believing this lifestyle was her only way of survival, already disowned and discarded by her family, decided to trade up to a better brothel (which “better” being subjective) where she earned the reputation for being a nasty and vicious woman. After finding work as a maid in a restaurant, Sada became romantically involved with a wealthy customer named Goro Omiya, a banker to the Japanese Parliament, eventually getting herself into another scuffle over having sexual relations with a client of the restaurant.

            In Tokyo, she found work in a restaurant owned by Kichizo Ishida, a known womanizer and married man. The two soon began making long sojourns at love hotels, lengthy absences from the prying eyes of the community but even if everyone wasn’t aware of Ishidi’s reputation, Sada’s heavy drinking and incessant violent tempers fuelled by jealous and her adamant desire for Ishida to leave his wife, brought their tryst to the forefront of gossip and rumor. Sada was in an undeniable amour fou with Ishida and it was clear that she had no plans to lose in her race to rid them of the wife and every other lurking, naïve girl Ishida was known to prey on.

            According to the stories from former lovers of Ishida and Sada, Ishida was a fan of sadomasochism, not uncommon for many powerful men and women “bottoming from the top,” giving up power to their partners so that they are not only free of any domineering roles but allowing themselves to freefall into acts they have nor want any control over. During a few of their rendezvous, Sada was known to asphyxiate Ishida on occasion and even inflicting pain upon him so that he could achieve climax and suggestive afterglows. According to Sada, Ishida said to her "You'll put the cord around my neck and squeeze it again while I'm sleeping, won't you ... If you start to strangle me, don't stop, because it is so painful afterward." He was taking sedatives to ease the pain, as every event of erotic asphyxiation became more and more brutal, common in sadomasochism, as every event must push the pedestal of pleasure every time, pale in comparison every past act.

            On May 18, 1936 erotic asphyxiation became the sword he fell on as Sada used the tune of their sexual trade to strangle him to death with a sash. Knowing she couldn’t have Ishida to herself, Sada recalled feeling ultimately relieved, knowing now he could belong to no one else and that forever he would be hers, the last woman he would ever bed. Sada lied next to Ishida’s dead body for a few hours before taking a kitchen knife and cutting off his penis and testicles, wrapping them in a magazine cover, carrying them around until she was finally taken into custody three days later.

            During the trial of Sada Abe, the judge himself admitted to becoming sexually aroused by the details given during the preceding. During her trial, Sada stated "The thing I regret most about this incident is that I have come to be misunderstood as some kind of sexual pervert ... There had never been a man in my life like Ishida. There were men I liked, and with whom I slept without accepting money, but none made me feel the way I did toward him." She was subsequently found guilty of second degree murder and the mutilation of a corpse and sentenced to six years in prison, though she did ask to be put to death for her crimes. Sada was released exactly five years after her sentence and went on to write an autobiography to refute previous published accounts and biographies of her character and the character of the case.

            While Sada Abe’s case may have taken place over a century ago, today it still speaks wonders for a woman trapped in a misogynistic society, volleying for control over not only her life or destiny but for love. And by placing Sada Abe next to some of the great suffragettes we’ve come to know in history would be an appalling happening, we can’t dismiss the fact of a woman who was, through sexually experience, impressionably naïve, without a family or anywhere to turn other than a man who made his hobby serving women misery by using them up as all the men around him in such a society could do without any reprisal beyond a woman’s scorn, where no man in our entire human history has ever been immune from.