The brief and brilliant life of a truly unique artist, Izumi Suzuki

Izumi Suzuki was born in Japan in 1949. After graduating high school, she moved to Tokyo, where she worked as a bar hostess. She appeared in a few “pink films”—an arty subgenre of sexploitation cinema—directed by Kōji Wakamatsu, among others, and posed for the erotic art photographer Nobuyoshi Araki before devoting herself to writing full time.