A cult artist, Toshio Saeki is the inventor of a unique style in a field he has totally transformed: ero guro, which can be translated as "erotico-grotesque scenes".

Attributed to the writer Edogawa Ranpo, this genre is rooted in the origins of classical Japanese drawing, feeding monsters and nightmarish scenes into numerous prints throughout the ages. By combining traditional motifs with his own obsessions, Saeki echoes the anxieties of his generation, the youth of the 1970s, who believed they could free themselves from the conventions of a paternalistic society, only to be disillusioned.

Human society, with its violence and shortcomings, is the setting for scenes whose cruelty provokes terror or laughter, pushing the mechanics of fantasy to its limits. Here, sadomasochism covers up no reality, relying on onirism to create a form of macabre poetry. Stimulated by Japanese censorship - it is forbidden to show the sexes - Saeki turns the forbidden into an artistic constraint, transforming the world's oldest subject into absurdity and onirism. His precise style, which reminds Europeans of the famous "clear line" of Hergé and Joost Swarte, remains strange to Japanese and Western readers alike, each finding in this perfectly simple line a new form of exoticism. This perception can only be explained by the absolute originality of an extravagant imagier, straight from the pen of an artist who devoted his life to tracing as closely as possible "what goes on in his head when he closes his eyes".

This second volume of the anthology follows on from "Rêve écarlate" and brings together the illustrations published between 1972 and 1974 in "SM Selecto" magazine.

WARNING: this book of illustrations includes a preface translated into three languages (French, English and Japanese).

Author/Artist: Toshio Saeki
Publisher: Cornelius Publishing 
Page Count: 192pp
Size: 6.75 x 9.5
Notes: hardcover, color, dust jacket
Date of Publication: June 2024