Namio Harukawa (春川ナミオ) was born in May 1947 and died on 24 April 2020. The name is a pseudonym, and in fetish art it sits almost on top of extreme female-domination drawing. The pictures keep returning to erotic asphyxia, facesitting, women drawn extremely fat with flesh, and men turned into human furniture. That set of images still marks one branch of femdom pictures online and in print. The smothering in the drawings is a fantasy on paper. A real facesit or a real block on breathing can injure someone and can kill them. It is not a diagram you copy. If adults agree to anything that touches breath, they agree it beforehand and they can stop it at once.
He was born in Osaka Prefecture. In high school he sent drawings to the postwar pulp magazine Kitan Club (奇譚クラブ), which ran SM prose, SM illustration, and early bondage photography together. Through the 1960s and 1970s he made a living drawing fetish art under the name Namio Harukawa. Namio is an anagram of Naomi, pointing at Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s novel Naomi. The surname comes from the actress Masumi Harukawa. Most of the working life stayed inside porn magazines. Wider critical notice, and a reputation that could stand near a museum, came after the 2000s. Praise came from SM novelist Oniroku Dan, from the experimental artist and filmmaker Shūji Terayama, and from Madonna. Critics have also set his line and his excess next to Robert Crumb. What drives the pictures is the gap in scale and the humiliation, not realistic anatomy.
Books and the Paris show
In Japan there were two volumes of Kyonyū Katsuai. The French house United Dead Artists published Callipyge in 2009, his first book outside Japan, and Maxi Cula in 2012. In 2013 the Museum of Eroticism in Paris gave him his first solo show abroad: 71 works, 59 of them from the Garden of Domina series. In 2012 Pottoshuppan published Garden of Domina: An Illustrated Story. In 2019 Kawade Shobō Shinsha published the anthology The Incredible Femdom Art of Namio Harukawa.
He died on 24 April 2020. Yuko Kitagawa, who runs a video-production company and had known him a long time, confirmed it on her blog. For people who look at BDSM and fetish art he is still the Japanese facesitting illustrator people mean: smothering, a huge dominating body, furniture slavery, packed into pictures that could travel. They went from Kitan Club’s pulp pages to a museum wall in Paris and then onto image boards everywhere. Collectors start with the United Dead Artists editions and the 2019 Kawade anthology. One end of the career is mid-century Japanese SM pulp. The other is an international erotic-art market that later hung magazine “obscenity” as gallery work. The person grinding out pages for the magazines and the person given a solo show late in life are the same Namio Harukawa.
