Fukiage was born in February 1889 into extreme poverty in Akita prefecture and was sent out to work as a child. In 1906, aged seventeen, he raped and strangled an eleven-year-old girl. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1907 and released on licence in 1922.
Between 1923 and 1924 he raped and killed six girls aged eleven to sixteen. He admitted to a very large number of rapes across both periods, the figure usually given being over ninety. He was arrested on July 28, 1924. Japanese reporting of the period reached for the language of erotomania to describe him.
He was convicted and hanged on September 28, 1926, aged thirty-seven.
In prison he wrote an autobiography which was published and which is the reason the case is still discussed in Japan. It is an account of destitution, of child labour, and of what he had done, written by a man awaiting execution, and it was taken up by abolitionists at the time and has been reprinted since. It is also the principal source for most of what is said about him, which is worth keeping in view: the interior of this case comes from the condemned man's own book.