#maruo

from Shojo Tsubaki (2003 reprint)

Suehiro Maruo - Hōichi, the earless (from 'Lunatic Lovers')

All three of @sourstacks's Sannin family portraits together!

Les enfants du 20ème siècle

Naruto fan oc’s that me and my partner have been playing with

Fairly recently I got my hands on a set of interesting flyers that are adjacent to my current interest in early guro media and Japanese surrealism. I scanned both flyers in, front and back. This one is the flyer for an event that was called Maro Akaji’s Panorama Museum (麿赤児のパノラマ怪奇館). I couldn't find that much information on the event, only a few tweets exist that describe it as being a haunted house-styled performance from 1992 that featured music by John Zorn. Akaji Maro was a butoh performer who alongside directing his own theater productions also acted in films like Shinya Tsukamoto's Gemini, so it's likely that the event would've been in some way or another styled after butoh. I'm assuming that the title is an allusion to the 1926 Edogawa Ranpo novel The Strange Tale of Panorama Island. The affiliation would be fitting since outside of Maruo’s own recent adaption of the story, the most well-known retelling of Panorama Island was Teruo Ishii’s Horrors Of Malformed Men, which prominently featured butoh actors with Tatsumi Hijikata acting as the film’s main antagonist.