No one wants to die, not really. Still, it’s something we all have to do. Life ends in death, plain and simple. We do what we can to fight it off. We make contingencies and plans, like buying term life insurance, to help out or families if our time comes before it should. So you have to really wonder if there’s a “good” way to die. For most of us, the answer is probably “no.”

That said, there are some ways to die that are worse than others. Some are truly horrifying. Take, for example, Kichizo Ishida. Very few men would want to go out the way that he did.

Ishida’s story starts with Sada Abe. Sada was the youngest surviving child in a family of four children. Unfortunately for Ishida, Sada’s childhood wasn’t stellar. She fell in with the wrong crowd. She was raped at the age of 15, and became troubled as any young girl would. Eventually, she was sent to work at a geisha house because her family couldn’t handle her.

This might have been fine for Sada, but she didn’t have the kind of training she’d have needed as a child to become one of the superstar geishas that, at the time, were very much like celebrities. Essentially, she filled the roll of a call girl and, eventually, left the geisha house to work as a prostitute.

Sada moved from brothel to brothel after stealing from clients and running away from various brothels. By the 1930s, she was working as an unlicensed prostitute. Her parents died in 1932 and 1934, and she became the mistress of one Kinnosuke Kasahara in 1934.

By 1935, she decided to work in a restaurant owned by Kichizo Ishida. He accepted Sada into an apprenticeship, and made sexual advances. She fell in love with him, and they began an affair. Unfortunately Ishida was married, and he intended to return to his wife in May 1936.

That’s where things got messed up. She bought a kitchen knife, and threatened Ishida. He thought it was some sort of sexual game, and aroused him. The long story made short is that Ishida asked Sada to strangle him, which she did. She strangled him to death, actually, after which she cut off his genitals and carved her name into his body.

Lorena Bobbit has nothing on Sada Abe.

Now that’s a horrible way to die. Makes you hope that you die peacefully, in your sleep, doesn’t it?

Photo via Lunchbox Photography