Shibusawa Tatsuhiko was a prominent presence on the literary scene in Japan from the 1960s until his death in 1987. I believe that, in many respects, Shibusawa was in the vanguard of a literary and artistic movement that was to have a decisive effect on the direction of contemporary Japanese culture. He was fascinated by the dark, exotic, and the erotic. He introduced de Sade to the Japanese public and wrote numerous essays on the essential role of sexuality in the development of civilization. By the 1970s, however, he tired of these themes and went on to categorize and describe the derivation of magic from the natural world. He ended his career as a writer of fantasy novels.
Because Shibusawa is an intellectual who has not been studied in or introduced to countries outside Japan, I have tried in this study to provide a general outline of Shibusawa's life and work. My thesis focuses on the ways in which Shibusawa incorporated such disciplines as natural history, folklore studies, and studies of the supernatural into his literary works and championed eroticism, exoticism, mystery, and geometric images. In doing so, I analyze his essay collections and his novel Chronicle of Prince Takaoka's Journey Overseas.