Fièvres nocturnes

Fièvres nocturnes – An artist with a veritable cult following, 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”. Credited 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 echoed the anxieties of his generation, the youth of the 1970s, who believed they could break free from the conventions of a paternalistic society, only to be disillusioned.

Human society, its violence and its defects, are the backdrop for scenes whose cruelty provokes terror or laughter, pushing the mechanics of fantasy to its limits. Here, sadomasochism covers no reality, drawing on onirism to create a form of macabre poetry. Stimulated by Japan’s censorship – it is forbidden to show the sexes – Saeki turns the forbidden into an artistic constraint, turning the world’s oldest subject into the absurd and the dreamlike. His precise style, which reminds Europeans of the famous “clear line” of Hergé and Joost Swarte, remains strange to both Japanese and Western readers, each of whom finds 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 compiles illustrations published between 1972 and 1974 in SM Selecto magazine.

This book of illustrations has a foreword translated into three languages (French, English and Japanese).