While Gunma prefecture's detectives questioned him at Maebashi in the summer of 1924, Satarō Fukiage drank beer. He had a way of sorting the girls he had attacked. The ones he had killed he called shini-wakare, parted by death; the ones he had raped and left alive were iki-wakare, parted in life. He showed no remorse, and so much of what he told them was grandiose invention that the detectives wasted trip after trip checking it. At one point he confessed to thirteen murders. Later he took most of that back, insisted he had killed six girls, and said a police officer had put leading questions to him.
He was born on February 1, 1889, in the Nishijin weaving district of Kyoto, the eldest son of a loom worker. The family was desperately poor, six more children followed, and minding them kept him out of elementary school. His father drank heavily and had sex in front of the children when drunk, and by seven Fukiage was touching his younger sister. Sent out to work at eight or nine, he ran off with his employers' money and was dismissed from job after job. At eleven, working at a weaving shop, he slept in the same room as two maids of seventeen or eighteen, and one of them forced herself on him night after night; when it came out, he lost the job. At twelve he was jailed in Kyoto for stealing five yen. He found prison better than home. Cellmates taught him crime, and the prison chaplain's lessons in basic arithmetic absorbed him. By thirteen he had served a second term, this time a year's sentence for theft.
At sixteen he went back to Nishijin and found his family gone; they had scattered and gone begging in Shikoku. He set off after them, ran out of money, and returned to Kyoto, where he rented a house with stolen money and his savings and moved them into it. At seventeen he became the kept young lover of a woman in her mid-fifties, a relationship he later described as forced on him, and then he turned on her eleven-year-old daughter, and on girls and young women workers in the neighborhood.
On September 24, 1906, shortly before he was due for his conscription examination, he spoke to a girl walking near Kinkaku-ji, the Golden Pavilion, took her up the hill behind it, and attacked her. She was eleven, and she knew him. When she would not stop crying he killed her. He thought about running but had no money, and he was arrested the next day. The Kyoto District Court sentenced him to life imprisonment. In prison he fought with the guards, and he read: Confucius and Mencius, Socrates and Aristotle, the Buddhist teacher Nichiren. His sentence was later reduced under an amnesty, and he was released in 1922.
Out of prison he dug tunnels and toured the countryside with a traveling theater troupe, and kept none of it up for long. He moved through Nagoya, Yokohama and Tokyo, lost a job at a Tokyo inn when an affair with a maid came to light, and drifted through Aizuwakamatsu, Akita, Noshiro and Utsunomiya before going back to Kyoto and then returning to Tokyo to work for a rice dealer. In April 1923 he was arrested over an assault on a small girl, described in one account as a four-year-old and in another as the rice dealer's daughter, whom he injured. He said he was sorry, his younger brother stood guarantor, and he was released. He walked out of his brother's house and wandered the prefectures around Tokyo.
Between June 1923 and April 1924 he raped and killed six girls between the ages of eleven and sixteen. Across eight prefectures of the Kanto region he raped at least twenty-seven. The totals for his whole life are guesses: one theory puts them at ninety-three girls and about a hundred women, and some estimates run higher. He was arrested on July 28, 1924, held overnight at the Sotokanda police station in Tokyo, and handed to the police of Gunma, where most of the killings had taken place.
He was tried on three of the six killings. The Maebashi District Court sentenced him to death on May 17, 1925, and his appeal was dismissed in 1926. Asked by the presiding judge whether he had anything to say, he announced that he would appeal to the Supreme Court because he wanted time to finish and publish the autobiography he was writing, and would drop the appeal once it was done. The court upheld the sentence on July 2, 1926. By then he had read his way through Western philosophy and literature in his cell and filled some three thousand manuscript pages.
The book was called Shaba, a title rendered in English as The Street. On September 28, 1926, the day he was to be hanged at Ichigaya Prison in Tokyo, his lawyer hurried there with a bound copy. The lawyer was not allowed to see him, but a guard handed Fukiage the book, and he was said to be overjoyed. He was executed that day. The press reported that he went to his death with composure, unlike many condemned men. In the book he asked parents to watch over their children. It was published by Ganshōdō Shoten in October 1926 and banned as soon as it went on sale. A 1933 compilation of Japanese criminal history filed him under the headline that he had strangled more than twenty young girls, and a book-length study, Document: Serial Girl Murders, appeared in 1993.