First the book and then the Movie
In 2015, William Johnston wrote about this macabre episode in the book called, “Geisha, Harlot, Strangler, Star,” but that was not where I ran into her. It was another book, the 100 Most Infamous Crimes in History by Jo Durden Smith, that I got as a birthday gift. It is available here. I guess it is in alphabetical order because she was #1. I hoped to do more, but I got a lot of flak from her chart, as it appalled several readers for using astrology in that manner. That said Marc Edmund Jones has a few murderers in his Jones 100 and Charles E. Carter, a British solicitor and famed astrologer, not only used but recommended astrology for understanding the “criminal mind.”
Little coverage of the trial happened outside of Japan, probably because 1930s Japan was very much closed to foreigners. Then in 1979 a movie called “Realm of the Senses”, it has an X rating. There is a trailer is on YouTube and cinema writer Donald Richie writes about it here. Realm is now part of the Criterion Collection and one can buy the DVD on the site too.
A recount of the trial, in English, is here.
Miss Abe’s Map
Ms. Abe has a fantastic chart, from a purely astrological point of view. She has two Grand Trine Kites, a Yod, a Wedge and a T-Square. The main map shows the Yod going to Mars in his Lord’s house of Scorpio, incredibly in the twelfth from the sextile of the Sun and Venus — a lovely lady. That Mars in the twelfth gave her a healthy sexual appetite, which worked out well for a geisha girl. Antecdotally, she and her victim had notoriously long sexual rendezvouses — they were insatiable.
She was born in Tokyo during the Russo-Japanese War, on May 28th 1905. There is very little about her family except she was “born to a farming family;” at least that is what the Japanese Tabloids claimed.
Up up and away with my beautiful balloon!
Grand Trine Kites are supposedly a rare astrological configuration but Sada has one. Hers is dominated by Mars 11 Scorpio 01 (retrograde) in the eleventh house opposite Mercury in Taurus, a sex worker, with Neptune and Saturn as the wing sextiles to create the kite coming in from the eighth and the third..
Two contemporary celebrities also have this configuration in the same quadratures: Whitney Houston and Madonna, with Whitney’s unfortunate kite turning against her and causing her suicide; Madonna made money from slandering her first husband, Sean Penn in the infamous “At Close Range” flick. Neptune in the eighth house suggests in these situations legacies and sentimentality. For her parting is such sweet sorrow that she would need a “reminder,” unable with Saturn in the Piscean third house, to let the past go. Saturn in Pisces in the third is the inability to “let go” literally.
Miss Abe’s T-Square comprises three cardinal signs: Uranus in Capricorn opposite Neptune in Cancer with the middle square in the Moon in Aries in the fourth. If we used an asteroid to complete the grand square, each planetary star ninety degrees away from the other, we find asteroid 514,107 Ka’epoka’awela opposite the Moon, having the associated meaning “of mischievous”) because it its orbit is always retrograde around Jupiter.
The horror!
The Japanese Press ran with the story. Emperor Hirohito’s militaristic Japan was in its ascendancy, and Shogunate style Japan was being heralded. The tabloids, censured by the government, found Sada’s story a good way to obliquely criticize the government’s posture.
Thus, they promoted the story of a poor farming girl who is forced to leave home at fourteen to make her fortune in the big city as a geisha (Venus in Aries, in detriment but found in the fifth house of pleasure). With no family to turn to, Sada found herself alone and now old (Saturn aspect to her South Node showing she was now about 30) when her employer (the mutable angle) spurned her, leaving her with no pension, savings, house, or children – in short, no viable future.
It sold like hotcakes to the horrified public and garnered Sada much sympathy (Aries Moon in detriment to Cancer Neptune in exaltation) .
Jones’s Angles
As for her Jones’s aspects: Her Line of Personality is sextile. Her Line of Vitality is square. Her Line of Efficiency is in opposition, as is her Line of Culture. As we noted before, a person who has all four sets of planetary pairs has a tendency to being overly self-involved. This fits the profile of “passion murderers” who are more concerned about themselves and how could their lover do this to them, than they are the loss of the lover-victim’s death..
Miss Wheeler gives as an image of the “Grand Army of the Republic (the Union’s Army in the War Between the States) at the campfire.” for Sada’s ascendant.. Marc Edmund Jones who expands the symbol and gives it meaning, writes it is about “the cultivation and preservation of ties to others “; which works well here.
With her grand trine in water, Sada is locomotive planetary pattern.1 Marc Jones called them “temperate types.”
In the end
The military released Ms. Abe from jail in 1942 after she served six years, as World War Two unfolded and required all Japanese men were required for service. She died in 1966, age sixty-one. I have not read she ever married.
Notes:
I updated this post on 24 April, 2024 for clarity, removing some extraneous images and replacing them with the recipe for Japanese hotcakes.
Footnotes:
- 1Marc Jones called them “temperate types.”
