Stories Fables Ghostly Tales

Japanese true crime and Japanese folklore, one candle at a time.
In June 1981, a Japanese literature student in Paris asked a Dutch classmate to come to his apartment and help him with his German pronunciation. Renée Hartevelt was twenty-five. She said yes because she was the kind of person who noticed when somebody was sitting on their own.
Issei Sagawa confessed within days. He was never convicted, never imprisoned, and never spent a single night in a cell. He spent the next thirty-six years being interviewed, published, booked and paid — and at one point, employed as a restaurant critic.
This episode pairs his case with the jikininki: the Buddhist hungry ghost, cursed to devour the dead every night through a throat too narrow to swallow anything at all. A creature no court can touch, no prison can hold, and no executioner can reach — one that ends only when somebody finally decides to stop feeding it.
Two stories about an appetite that was never the crime.
It was the sentence.
⸻
Contains: graphic violence, cannibalism, sexual violence (referenced, not depicted), and detailed discussion of a real victim. Listener discretion advised.
Chapters
00:00 The Lighting
02:40 The Priest at the Hermitage
15:30 Renée
20:40 The Woman in the Ground-Floor Apartment
27:30 The Eleventh of June
36:00 The Hole in the Law
40:00 The Godfather
43:30 The Rite
50:00 The Ones Who Keep The Candles Lit
⸻
There is an old Japanese game. A hundred candles are lit in a windowless room. Every story told puts one out. Nobody agrees on what arrives when the last one dies — only that you should not be there to see it.
This is Candle 001.
Ninety-nine to go...

What happens when folklore becomes too terrible to be fiction? Can you listen past the performance and find the true forensic history?
Welcome back to Stories Fables Ghostly Tales. In tonight’s interactive special, the Tale Teller presents an impossible challenge: "Three Waters, Dark Tides: Two Myths, One Truth."
We have gathered three haunting accounts of Japan's relationship with the dark, cold element of water. One is a factual, historical tragedy; the other two are timeless legends. Your mission is to determine which of these deep, dark tides actually swept across our reality. Do not let the mythology fool you. Lock in your guess internally.

Story 1: The Riverman’s Debt. We travel to the muddy riverbanks of the Edo period to meet the Kappa, the bizarre, polite river imp possessing a lethal obsession with the human shiridama.

Story 2: The Bailing Phantoms. We step onto a 1930s fishing trawler in the open ocean to face the Funayūrei, ghost ships manned by the victims of maritime tragedy, draped in white funeral shrouds, demanding empty dippers to flood passing vessels.

Story 3: The Saint of Shinjuku. We travel to the crumbling ruins of post-war Tokyo to confront the terrifying modern legend of the sanatorium run by "Sensei," also known as "The Saint," who was whispered to perform a chilling "mercy ritual" in the nursery known as "Cold Storage."

Keep your tea hot, keep your porch lights burning against the rising fog, and remember... sometimes the Saint is just a monster with a good alibi. Until next time... pleasant dreams... if you can sleep at all.
Did you guess the story...correctly?
I am your Tale Teller...
Have a wonderful night... 💜💜💜

Turn the lights down low...
It is time for Tall Tales and True Crime...
In this episode of Stories Fables Ghostly Tales, we explore one of the most widely discussed and psychologically complex cases in modern Japan: The 1997 Kobe Case, historically known across the nation as the Sakakibara Investigation.
In the spring of 1997, the peaceful neighbourhood of Suma Ward in Kobe, Japan was gripped by sudden fear following a series of alarming suburban incidents. For three long months, an entire community lived in heightened state of caution while detectives worked tirelessly to track down a phantom subject who communicated through cryptic notes sent to local newspapers. When law enforcement finally identified the individual responsible, the revelations reshaped Japan's legal framework and societal views on youth mental health forever.
In the second half, we step away from modern investigative archives and journey into the deep mountain forests of ancient Japan to explore the legend of the Satori —a famous Yōkai from Edo-period folklore known for its uncanny ability to read human thoughts in real time and unmask hidden intentions. We weave these two worlds together, contrasting the mind-reading spirit of mythology against the real-world psychological mystery of silent warnings and unexamined shadows.

Turn down the lights...
Lock your doors...
Stay Safe...
Thank you for listening!
💜✨💜✨💜✨💜✨💜✨

On the morning of April 23, 1994, a park cleaner in Inokashira Park opened a utility trash container expecting ordinary market waste, only to find a severed human foot inside a translucent blue plastic bag. Within hours, police recovered twenty-seven separate body parts distributed across twenty-seven public trash bins—each piece meticulously cut to an exact length of twenty centimetres, drained completely of blood, and scrubbed clean.
Despite deploying over 110,000 police officers, investigating countless leads, and uncovering forensic perfection that defied normal criminal behaviour, two-thirds of the victim's body—including his head and internal organs—were never found. The case eventually hit the statute of limitations, leaving investigators staring into an absolute void.
In this episode, we explore the chilling Inokashira Park dismemberment and pair it with the ancient Japanese myth of the Noppera-bō (The Faceless Phantom)—examining how a human predator wiped away a man's face, identity, and record from history, leaving behind a blank, featureless slate.
Unique Facts About This Case

The killer cut every single body part to an exact length of 20 centimeters specifically because that was the precise width of the trash can slots in the park.

The remains were so thoroughly drained of blood and treated that investigators found no bloodstains inside the plastic bags or the bins where they were left.

To this day, two-thirds of the victim's body—including his face, skull, and internal organs—have never been recovered.

Thank you for listening legends...
Stay curious...
Stay a little scared...
And whatever you do... if you pass a stranger in the dark tonight... don't look too closely at their face.
Have a great week ahead legends! 💀

⚠ CONTENT WARNING: This episode contains extensive, highly detailed accounts of real-world serial murder, financial exploitation, the complete thermal destruction of human remains, and themes of animal cruelty. Listener discretion is absolutely mandatory.
Welcome back to Stories Fables Ghostly Tales. Tonight, we present The Art of Transparency: The Saitama Dog Lover Murders — Japan, 1993.
Deep within the mountain passes of Saitama Prefecture, a remote wooden hut once hid a factory of absolute non-existence. We pull back the friendly, commercial facade of a luxury pet breeding kennel to dissect a terrifying pattern of cold-blooded, economically driven slaughter.
🎧 The Case: Making Men Invisible
In 1993, the charismatic operator of the Africa Kennel, Gen Sekine and his cold, analytical partner, Hiroko Kazama , found themselves drowning in millions of yen of bubble-era debt. Their solution was chillingly simple: make their creditors and business rivals completely "transparent." Utilizing a lethal veterinary compound mixed into polite health tonics, they killed their victims in minutes, dismembered the remains, incinerated the tissue to powder, and hammered the bones to dust before casting them into mountain rivers. They believed that without a body, there was no crime—until forensic teams literally began sifting the riverbeds for tooth shards.
🐕 The Myth: The Volatile Fury of the Hound
The cold, predatory architecture of this modern kennel crime perfectly mirrors a forbidden, ancient folk sorcery from Japan's rural past: the invocation of the Inugami . Born from an act of unspeakable human cruelty—starving a hound and severing its head at the absolute peak of its fury—this invisible dog-spirit was bound to households to destroy competitors and generate immense, illicit wealth. But the folklore carries a terrifying trap. The Inugami obeys only out of constraint, and if the master's willpower slips or their greed becomes too bloated, the curse turns entirely inward, consuming the family until they descend into madness.
Did Gen Sekine truly master the art of non-existence, or did the ancient malice of the kennel jar simply turn around to bite back?
Hit play, sit back, and get comfortable.
And remember... if you see a ripple of heat moving through a freezing fog... don't assume you're walking alone.
Stay curious.
Stay a little scared.
Goodnight. 💀